CELEBRATING 20 YEARS OF THE PERRY PRIZE
11 Mar 2025
Congratulations to Murat Urlali, this year's Perry Prize winner
We congratulate Turkish-born Australian artist Murat Urlali, winner of the $25,000 acquisitive Adelaide Perry Prize for Drawing 2025, for his work titled I Will Have Redemption.
From over 400 entries, this year’s judge, artist Danie Mellor, selected 43 finalists for the exhibition.
Murat Urlali’s work was the recipient of the 2025 award at the opening event on Friday 28 February at Adelaide Perry Gallery in Sydney.
To celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Perry Prize, an additional acquisitive prize, the PLC Sydney Prize for Arts Education was awarded to Becc Ország.
At the end of the Exhibition of Finalists, the work voted 'most popular' by visitors to the Gallery will be awarded the 2025 People's Choice Award.
Murat has exhibited widely across Australia and internationally, including at Sydney Contemporary and the British School at Rome. A finalist in prestigious prizes such as the Dobell Drawing Prize and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Award, he continues to make a significant impact in contemporary art.
Murat’s work intertwines figuration with patterned abstraction, merging illusionistic representation and geometric compositions. After a successful career in the television and film industry, he relocated to Australia. Pursuing his passion for art, Murat earned a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) in 2015 and a Master of Fine Art Research (Painting) in 2017 from the National Art School in Sydney.
“I find inspiration in the sensual opportunities presented by piping lines onto a page – so I have pivoted away from the traditional tools of drawing, creating reliefs which recall a practice prevalent in Persian-Ottoman art. I use golden acrylic piping paste, gold leaf and rhinestones to create a light, almost playful yet opulent touch to the complex subject matter of the work – reflections on the nature of, and indeed the need for, redemption.
Life choices, experiences, frustrations, successes, temptations and regrets represented through tangible relics, my djinns, and otherworldly beings stand in juxtaposition with the ‘noli me tangere’ narrative of Maria Magdalena in Baroque art. I locate these works in the garden of the House of the Virgin by Ephesus, the location of many a Sunday family picnic growing up – a space I return to when I need to feel a sense of release from the challenges and pressures of the present to move forward into a future, which remains, as ever, indeterminate", said Murat.
For more information about Murat and his work, visit muraturlali.com
Becc Ország's 'Laboured Breath/Respite', the 2025 PLC Sydney Prize for Arts Education winner.
We congratulate Becc Ország, winner of the PLC Sydney Prize for Arts Education, an additional acquisition valued at $8,500, for her work titled Laboured Breath/Respite.
Becc is a Melbourne-based artist whose practice encompasses drawing, sculpture and sound and is primarily an investigation into sacred space and religious experience, grounded in the psychological phenomenon of paramnesia (déjà vu), the distortion of memory or the confusion of fantasy with reality. Her meticulous drawings are imbued with the universally experienced emotion ‘Sehnsucht’ (German noun.); an individual’s unfulfilled longing for an idealistic, unattainable alternate experience, such as the longing for a heaven or utopic land.
Her compositions of immaculate sacred lands are filled with both unattainable beauty and contradictions, exploring the complex interplay between utopic and dystopic ideals that teeter on the edge of reality, using the fragmented and fragile nature of our recollections to challenge and contemplate the nature of reality itself.
For more information about Becc and her work, visit www.beccorszag.com
