The RDS Visual Art Awards partner with the RHA Gallery Dublin for the second time in its history, supporting the newest talents in Irish art today as they enter into professional practice, while guiding these graduate artists to make a large-scale exhibition at the RHA Gallery from November 2024 until January 2025.
The RDS Visual Art Awards is the most important platform for visual art graduates in Ireland. It has a very profound social impact on artists and the country’s cultural industry as it provides substantial funding to arts programming.
The Awards also create a high-end curated exhibition opportunity with a significant prize fund this year of over €40,000, as well as vital exposure for emerging visual artists as they move into early professional practice.
This year’s curator is the RHA’s very own Colin Martin. Colin is an acclaimed Irish artist in his own right and is also the Head of the RHA School – a dynamic learning environment to support art students to build the skillset and material knowledge to make creative and exciting art for today.
Martin says that “The RDS Visual Arts Awards is an exciting and dynamic exhibition that brings together the innovative and relevant art practices of an emerging generation of visual artists, where platform, practice and audience meet.
The alchemy of these interwoven strands has a storied history and has forged the careers of many of the today’s leading voices in contemporary visual arts from established artists Dorothy Cross and James Hanley to new voices in contemporary art such as Elaine Hoey and Bassam Al Sabah.
This is a rigorous all-Island selection process and I am delighted to act as curator for this year’s iteration to be held at the prestigious RHA.”
There are 10 exhibiting artists that have been meticulously selected to exhibit this year and they have been chosen from some of the best BA & MA visual art graduates from all over Ireland, having gone through a rigorous competitive two-stage process to get their work into this much sought show for emerging artists.
The 2024 exhibition will be embedded into the RHA Gallery’s core programming as it runs from November, 2024 to 18 January 18th, 2025 – giving further opportunity to the artists’ work to be seen at an internationally renowned gallery space and for a proper run period of time that gives impetus to spotlight their work holistically.
The RDS Visual Art Awards are at the RHA Gallery until Jan 18th 2025.
Feature Image: Sorcha Browning
The full list of this year’s award winners can be found here.
