Gartan artist Daniel Nelis has been selected as this year’s winner of the Ireland-U.S. Council Award for Outstanding Portraiture.
Nelis’ ‘Boy and a Blanket (Reflection)’ is a self-portrait which has already won numerous awards, picking up the Royal Ulster Academy Portrait Prize in 2015.
The latest award was presented on Saturday at the opening of the 194th Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA) Annual Exhibition at Ely Place in Dublin.
The esteemed award from the Ireland-U.S. Council has been an important career marker for many of today’s successful portrait painters in Ireland.
“Finding out that I would be the recipient of this year’s IAR prize was the most amazing news,” Daniel said.
“It carries with it such a rich history of significant figures in Irish portraiture that have previously won the award. I feel so fortunate and grateful to have my work recognised this year.”
Boy and a Blanket (Reflections) Oil on panel by Daniel Nelis
Nelis’ practice is informed by the people and places he knows.
“I am most interested in moments of quiet contemplation, moments of intense reflection in the vivid reality of the present,” he said.
“The work showing at the RHA is a self-portrait going back some years. It trades in the same thematic stock described, yet by virtue of being a self-portrait it is different. Painting a self-portrait is always tempting as a practical concern, as with time-consuming work no sitter is more available than yourself. Yet it’s impossible to employ the same aperture when looking at yourself as when looking at others.”
Nelis is a visual artist, an art educator and an early stage curator. A poignant picture of his dad was also recently selected for the National Portrait Gallery Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024 and will go on display at the National Portrait Gallery in London from July 11th to October 27th this year.
In 2023 his work was awarded the Tyrone Guthrie Centre Director’s Award at the Royal Ulster Academy Annual Exhibition, Belfast, and the RSA Guthrie Award and Medal at the Royal Scottish Academy Annual Exhibition, Edinburgh.
Previously at the RHA he was awarded the Niccolo D’Ardia Caracciola Award in 2021, and the RHA Hennessy Craig Scholarship in 2017.
Nelis has been teaching at St Eunan’s College in Letterkenny since 2018.
A recent graduate of the MA in Art History, Collections & Curating at UCD., he was also awarded the Michael McCarthy Medal for achieving the highest results in this course. Since completing the MA in 2022, he has been practicing as a curator in parallel to his painting practice. Most recently, he completed an early career curation residency with the Regional Cultural Centre and opened the ‘Other Worlds’ exhibition.