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Third time finalist, Logan Moffat, has gone on to win New Zealand’s most prestigious portraiture prize this year with a large-scale double portrait.

Moffat is an Auckland based artist, completing his BFA Honours degree at Elam School of Fine Arts last year. He was the second prize winner in the 2016 Adam Portrait Award. His first exhibition was in 2015, at the age of 17. At 21 he is the youngest person in the 20-year history of the award to win first prize.

International judge Angus Trumble, Director National Portrait Gallery of Australia initially selected 50 portraits from nearly 300 entries.  He said of the winning portrait:

 Logan Moffat’s Elam is a portrait of two of his fellow third year students (Jayden Plank and Harry Telfer), but it is also a rumination upon the creative process, specifically the studio environment in Auckland in which artist and both subjects are all currently embedded. I was impressed by the combination of affection and ennui, of clutter and spaciousness, of humour and seriousness that animate the work. The scale is handsome. The palette is high-keyed and generous; and the painting also belongs to the long tradition in the academy arising from art students—surely friends—together and separately dreaming big dreams. I congratulate Logan Moffat.

Also a third time finalist, is second prize winner Martha Mitchell. Of Mitchell’s work Trumble said:

Things to do, places to be, by Martha Mitchell impressed me by its unusually elongated format, the tension or expectancy arising from the combination of boy and dog companion, and the way in which both strain at the right and lower margins of the composition, as if they might topple forward and into ebullient, unstoppable action at any moment. Beyond that, the portrait is, I think, very beautifully painted and imbued with intimate family devotion. I congratulate Martha Mitchell.

An exhibition of the finalists Adam Portraiture Award is open daily at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery at Shed 11 on the Wellington Waterfront until 27 May.

The public can vote for their choice to win the People’s Choice Award, announced at the close of the exhibition.