A WORK from a series of 11 overlapping panels has taken the judges' eye to win this year's Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize.
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Jahnne Pasco-White created the work for an exhibition in Melbourne earlier this year before entering in the Bendigo Art Gallery-based prize. An exhibition featuring the 36 finalists for the prize opened this week.
The prize is held every two years and this year had a record 439 entries submitted.
Ms Pasco-White was still digesting her win on Thursday night.
"I feel in deep shock. Humbled and amazed," she said. "It's crazy. There's so many works in this show that I admire. Some of the artists (in the exhibition) were my teachers in art school.
"There's so many works I am in awe of by artists I have followed and looked to for inspiration.
"My understanding among painters in Melbourne is this prize is pretty huge. Looking at calibre of artists here speaks to that as well."
Bendigo Art Gallery senior curator Tansy Curtin, Home of the Arts (Queensland) director Tracy Cooper-Lavery and Guy family representative Roslyn Feeney judged the prize. They noted the raw, layered and vibrant work created an "incredible surface texture and palette."
"It's actually one panel from a series of 11, which I made over nine months. (The entire series) wraps around the whole gallery space, so feels like you're inside it.
"The work, I guess, is about this idea of the gut. We think about being human as being fully human but technically we only have 10 per cent human DNA. We're made up of all these other atoms and bacteria. I wanted to create a work that felt like one thing you're inside of but is made up of other parts."
Ms Pasco-White is a studio artist at Gertrude Contemporary in Melbourne and was the 2018 recipient of the Australia Council's Marten Bequest Scholarship. She has also exhibited in New York, Sydney and Auckland.
It was created for Arthur Guy by his brother Allen Guy. Arthur went to Camp Hill Primary School and Ballarat Grammar School before enlisted in the Royal Australian Air Force. He died on a biscuit bomber mission in New Guinea in 1945.
"The Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize an important survey of contemporary Australian panting, and we thank the Guy family for continuing this generous and important prize," Bendigo Art Gallery director Jessica Bridgfoot said.
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