Open 19

About

The Attenborough Prize was awarded to: Choterina Freer.

The Shortlisted artists were: Henrietta Corbett, Choterina Freer, Daniel Kelly, Stephanie Knowles, M. Niland & Joe Wilson.

Open 19, Leicester's biggest and most vibrant exhibition of local and regional artists. In this year's Open exhibition you can see a spectacular range of work by 223 artists, selected from over 950 entries by this year's panel of selectors: Juneau Projects ' Artists, Craig Fisher ' Artist and Senior Lecturer of Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University and Deborah Dean, Visual Arts & Exhibitions Manager, Nottingham Castle.
The City Gallery's annual open exhibition brings together 360 artworks by artists from Leicester and the East Midlands to demonstrate the great range of creativity within our local artist communities. The exhibition is an important point in the arts calendar in Leicester with the opportunity for both amateur and professional artists to submit work and to be included in this much-loved exhibition that is now in its nineteenth year.

This year is a particularly exciting year for us with the advent of the Attenborough Prize. The Attenborough prize is a £2,000 annual arts prize awarded by Leicester City Council. It is awarded to the best contemporary visual artist exhibiting at the City Gallery's Open Exhibition, the prize aims to encourage and support new artists in the city and surrounding region. The selectors for the prize are Lord Attenborough, Cllr Ross Willmott, Leader of Leicester City Council and Simon Lake, Senior Curator of Fine Art at New Walk Museum and Art Gallery.

We asked this year's panel of selectors to tell us what they thought of the Open 19 selection:
''A few things occurred to me as we sat making our judgements. The first thought was 'I am only giving my opinion, there is no right or wrong as to what should or should not be included.'. … This led me to my second thought: 'There is something intangible that makes me select one piece of work over another'. My third thought was 'It's quite amazing that the human race feels such a desire to make things, to express things'…. When IKEA ostensibly offers decoration and utensils for our home at budget prices what makes us create alternatives? What is the process inside ourselves that realises there is so much more to be had from creating?''
Ben Sadler of Juneau Projects

''Selection day was quite an event; if I had to sum up the experience in a word it would 'kaleidoscopic': around a thousand pieces of work to consider, dealing with a huge variety of ideas, subject matter and media, and selected by four people with a similar variety of likes and dislikes. I had my own favourites of course but I think everyone was impressed by how many people there are out there being creative.''
Deborah Dean, Visual Arts & Exhibitions Manager, Nottingham Castle

''Essentially I was allowed to enjoy the idiosyncrasies of the work put in front of me and revel in the range and diversity of work and the ways in which the artists making work translated the world they inhabited. It's always great to see the world through someone else's eyes because you get to see it from a completely different perspective.''
Craig Fisher ' Artist and Senior Lecturer of Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University

Open 19 provides an ideal opportunity to find an original work of art to buy. All the works in the exhibition are for sale with prices ranging from under £50 to £5,000. This exhibition is an excellent place to start building your own art collection!

The City Gallery would like to thank all of the many artists who took the time to submit their artwork to Open 19 and we'd like to congratulate all of those artists whose work was selected.