Nan Collantine and Jan Valik have been short-listed for this year’s Beep painting prize.
They will be on show in Swansea and Cardiff this summer as a result, under the title of ‘Everything has changed, Nothing has changed’, the theme this year. The winner will get a cash prize and a solo show in 2024.
Congratulations to Nancy and Jan on accruing this award, affirming their trajectory as emerging artists.
Civilisation can’t exist without a sense of play’: Nan Collantine’s work resonates with this intriguing statement by renowned anthropologist Claud Levi-Strauss. The lyrical fabric of her works is made up of rhythmic elements: containment, layer, overlap. Soft squares of colour chime. A take on the abstract tradition instigated by Piet Mondrian, they evoke a plural vision: as if there are many windows, many openings. Looking at her works gives the sense of being offered a way through.
Take a look at this young artist whose shapes and colours are often as strange as they are delightfully hypnotic. Jan describes himself as, “deeply interested in brushwork” and intrigued by the concept of “painting as a principle and a method of thinking in an effort for the metamorphosis of a trace into a vision.”