Zoe is the winner of the 2018 Portia Geach Memorial Award, Australia’s most prestigious art prize for portraiture by women artists, with her portrait of director Bruce Beresford. Beresford writes:
‘It’s always exciting to find a painter who not only has technique but a unique way of looking at the world. The first time I saw some of Zoe Young’s paintings I was fascinated by their exuberance & bizarre choice of subject matter as well as a visual style that struck me as not being derivative of other painters – Two admirable qualities in an era when so many admired artists are of this or that school. So many of them seem to be in the shadow of Picasso or Matisse or – WORSE- the New York school of painters such as Twombley, Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko etc etc.’ Bruce Beresford, November 2018
Zoe Young trained at the National Art School in Sydney under Ron Robertson-Swann, an apprentice of Henry Moore. The 2018 winner of the Portia Geach Memorial Award, two time finalist in both the Archibald Prize (2016, 2014) and the Calleen Art Prize (2018, 2017), she has also been named amongst the finalists of the Portia Geach Memorial Award (2017), the Mosman Art Prize (2017), Salon des Refusés, S. H. Ervin Gallery (2017), Cooks Gallery Emerging Art Prize, Newcastle (2015), and the Wingcarribee Art Prize, Southern Highlands (2015). In 2014, Young was Highly Commended in the Meroogal Women’s Art Prize, as well as Yen Magazine’s annual Female Artist of the Year. In 2013 she won the Snowy Mountains Art Prize and was Highly Commended in the John Briscoe Memorial Art Award at Raglan Gallery in Cooma.
