Bulgari Art Award 2017

Artist Tomislav Nikolic with his Bulgari Art Prize-winning work (Photo: Nick Moir/SMH)

 By Elissa Blake

Tomislav Nikolic is a painter with a compulsive interest in colour. As a five-year-old, he fixated on egg yolk yellow. “It was like an obsession, I still love that colour,” says the Melbourne-based painter. “I can’t really explain it in words.”

Nikolic, now considered one of Australia’s finest abstract colour painters, has been awarded the $80,000 Bulgari Art Award for his large scale work, one dominated by a colour he describes as pigeon blood or ruby red.

Nikolic has spent the last four years applying hundreds of coats of paint to his latest work to achieve a luminous effect that pulls the viewer into a bottomless pool of red. The image has a suitably fathomless title: Just before the most significant events, people are particularly prone to deny the possibilities of the future. (cause all we're doing is learning how to die).

“My paintings are created using 400 to 500 coats of paint to build up a body of colour,” he says. “Each coat is really transparent. The way I apply it, the colour is almost invisible. But all those layers make the brain perceive a solid colour. You really need to see it physically to see through the layers.”

Viewers will soon be able to do that for themselves as the Bulgari Art Award consists of $50,000 for the acquisition of the painting for the Art Gallery of New South Wales’ permanent collection. It also includes a residency for the artist in Rome, Italy, valued at $30,000. Now in its sixth year, the award is one of the most valuable art prizes in Australia.

Inspiration for the work came from another painting that took four years to create: Caravaggio’s Judith beheading Holofernes. “I had such a strong emotional reaction to that painting,” says Nikolic. “She’s cutting his head off with a huge sword and there is blood everywhere. It’s a really dark, powerful and confronting image and I wanted to make something confronting, too.

“My painting is not a literal representation; it’s more of a response,” he says. “But I try not to go too deeply into that sort of thing because we all see things so differently. Every viewer will see something different.”

Nikolic has worked a variety of odd jobs to support his art. He’s been a tram conductor, a pastry chef and an art gallery assistant, working full time on top of another 40-60 hours of painting each week.
“That was unsustainable but a lot of those jobs were really fun and I learned a lot,” he says. “I’ve only been painting full time in the last two years, usually eight hours a day.”

Nikolic uses acrylic paints combined with marble dust, and gilding materials such as gold, platinum, silver and copper leaf. “The marble dust creates an effect of making the painting surface more matte but it also absorbs and reflects light at the same time, creating a glowing effect,” he explains.

The quietly spoken painter says this is his first ever art prize and it has come as a shock. “I am really overwhelmed by it,” he says. “I’m still coming to terms with it. The prize has really pushed my ambitions. I have a lot of ideas in my mind and my sketchbooks, but they all take time and funds. It’s an incredible opportunity to create more ambitious work.”  

This story was first published in The Sydney Morning Herald on April 27, 2017.