Sydney artist Loribelle Spirovski is the 2021 winner of the Naked & Nude Art Prize at the Manning Regional Art Gallery for her painting, Moving House. The $30,000 award was judged this year by acclaimed artist and 2014 winner of the prize, Wendy Sharpe. Sharpe commented that the portrait of Spirovski’s husband, Simon Tedeschi “is a disarmingly intimate and personal work, the work is more naked than nude, both painter and sitter have an intimate understanding of each other.”

In her artwork statement Spirovski says, “My husband Simon Tedeschi is a concert pianist and I have painted him many times, not only because he is the closest person to me but because I love the lines of his body—they remind me of Michelangelo’s David, both virile and boyish. In this painting, I’ve portrayed him standing, distracted by his phone as he often is, in an environment as bare as him, painted in an impressionistic style that in turn exposes the paint and brushstrokes.

“If he had his choice, Simon would spend most of his time at home naked. Having spent so much of his life performing in formal wear and in an atmosphere of decorum, tradition, and fierce concentration, when he returns home the first thing Simon does is fling off all his outer layers – I see it almost as a way of unburdening himself in preparation for the next sonata or concerto. In the way I have portrayed him, there is nowhere to hide. The performer is gone. He is no longer behind his clothes.”

 

Nanda\Hobbs is excited to present a solo exhibition with Loribelle Spirovski in 2022.