The Contemporary British Painting Prize 2024
First Prize £8000 + more
Highly Commended Award £2000
Blyth Gallery Exhibition Award
£400 exhibitor’s fee for all shortlisted artists
Three exhibitions
Two full-colour catalogues
NEW: The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize
in association with Contemporary British Painting
Entry is now closed
We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has entered this year’s prize. It’s now over to our four selectors who have the arduous task of individually picking 15 artists to make up our 60-strong long list. Watch our social media accounts for announcements – all artists will be notified directly.
Key Dates
About the Prize
The Prize is organised and run by members of CBP – by painters for painters.
The Contemporary British Painting Prize Exhibition 2024 will be selected from an open call for contemporary painters working in the UK.
The prize is in three stages: long-listing; shortlisting for the exhibition; and judging.
A minimum of twelve artists will be shortlisted to exhibit by a selection panel of four painter members of the artist-led group Contemporary British Painting.
Judging
The separate panel of judges – made up of well-known members of the art world such as curators, artists, and writers – will select one prizewinner and one highly commended painter from the CBP Prize exhibition in Cardiff.
The Prize
The winner will receive £8000, a catalogue essay on their work, an invitation to become a member of Contemporary British Painting as well as a selector for the CBP Prize 2025.
Highly Commended Award £2000
One artist will be selected for the Blyth Gallery Exhibition Award.
The shortlisted artists will each receive a £400 exhibitor’s fee.
The Blyth Gallery Award will be selected and presented by Mindy Lee, CBP Member and Curator at Blyth Gallery, Imperial College London. The recipient of this award will work with Mindy on a curated solo or small group show for the 2025/26 academic year. The Blyth Gallery offers technician support, publicity, private view refreshments, an artist fee of £200 and an additional £200 funding towards transport of works. The exhibition will also be publicised on the CBP newsletter, website and @paintbritain social media.
We would like to thank John Talbot, collector of contemporary painting, for generously donating the prize money for the third year in a row.
We are also extremely grateful to Lubaina Himid for her generous financial support this year.
See the CBP Painting Prize archive
NEW: The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize in association with Contemporary British Painting
A memorial fund has been established in Judith Tucker’s name after her untimely death and has been built up by her family, friends, colleagues and former students.
Two prizes are offered, in Judith’s memory, to a woman artist based in the U.K. whose practice explores the relations between memory, place, environment and landscape through contemporary painting.
Judging
In this first year the judges of the prize will be the three trustees of the Fund: Lubaina Himid, Griselda Pollock and Harriet Tarlo. The announcement of the winner will be made on 30 November 2024 at the Huddersfield installation of the Contemporary British Painting Prize and the shortlisted paintings will be exhibited there.
The two prize-winning artists will be selected from the eligible short-listed works.
The Prize
There are two prizes – £1500 and £3000. There will also be a catalogue featuring the artists shortlisted for this very special award along with an accompanying essay.
Judith Tucker
Judith Tucker (1960-2023) was a British artist who taught Fine Art at the University of Leeds. She demonstrated a lifelong commitment to painting and to the artist community, including being a Founder member of Contemporary British Painting. At the time of her death in November 2023, she was its Chair. Her extensive body of work, created in series, examined and reflected upon landscape as place, memory and environment through both oil painting and large-scale drawing.
How to enter
Please read carefully before you make your submission. We have also provided additional information in the FAQs and the Terms and Conditions of entry. Good luck!
Who and what is eligible?
The aim of the prize is to explore and promote current painting, and we want to see the best of painting produced in the UK today.
All artists over 18 and of any nationality, living and professionally based (including students) in the UK (except CBP artist members) may enter.
Work should have been completed since 1st January 2022. The maximum size is 2.2m across the longest edge. 3D work must pass through a standard single doorway.
Please see FAQs for additional information about entry requirements.
We have teamed up with CuratorSpace where you can make your submission and pay the entry fee (see below). You will need to register with CuratorSpace if you have not already done so – registration is free. Before you start you may want to prepare your submission material first; this may save time and minimise complications when you complete the submission form. You will be able to save and edit your entry at any time, however you cannot make further alterations after the deadline.
Make sure you have paid and submitted your entry before the deadline.
Please Note: Deadline for entries: 11.59pm on Monday 1st July 2024. We strongly recommend that you do not leave your submission until the last moment. ENTRIES CANNOT BE ACCEPTED AFTER THE DEADLINE.
You need to provide:
1 Your contact details
We will need your contact details: name, email address, postal address/city/postcode and either a landline or mobile phone number.
2 Artist’s statement
Please submit a short (100-300 word) statement about your painting practice. You may want to compose it first and then paste it into the box on the form. Please avoid using any complicated formatting or links in your statement as these won’t be retained.
3 Website and social media
You can optionally add the URL of your artist website, along with your Instagram if you wish. This will allow us to tag you in social media posts. All submissions will be considered for our Painting of the Day feature.
4 Upload FIVE images
We need images of five different individual paintings. Diptychs, triptychs etc count as one painting. Paintings created before 1st January 2022 are not eligible. Works cannot be longer than 220cm on any side. The images should be jpeg files of good quality and medium to high resolution. We recommend between 960 and about 3000 pixels width. As a guideline file sizes will probably be up to about 1.5 or 2Mb (maximum per image 4Mb).
IMPORTANT: The CuratorSpace platform allows you to upload fewer than five images. You MUST upload images of five paintings otherwise your entry will not be eligible.
Note: If you try to upload too large a file or a file in the wrong format you will see an error message or cause the submission process to fail. The web has plenty of helpful information on how to photograph, re-size and convert your images.
If your work is selected we will ask for high-resolution images for the catalogue.
Painting details
We will also need some details about each painting:
• Title (if the work is untitled please put Untitled)
• Medium, eg: Oil on canvas
• Dimensions in cm
• The year
Do not add any other information here.
You must confirm that you will be over 18 by the deadline. You must also confirm that you accept the Terms and Conditions.
5 Pay and submit
The submission fee is £25. Payment by card is taken on submission through CuratorSpace. Once your payment has been taken and your form submitted you will be able to view your submission in your CuratorSpace account area.
If you are having difficulty making your submission please check that you have completed all fields correctly. You cannot submit your application unless this information is provided.
Contemporary British Painting Prize 2024
Entry form
You will be taken to the CuratorSpace website to make your submission where you will need to register (if you haven’t previously done so) and log in. Registration to CuratorSpace is free.
IMPORTANT: The CuratorSpace platform allows you to upload fewer than five images. You MUST upload images of five paintings otherwise your entry will not be eligible.
GOOD LUCK!
The Selection Process
The four selectors independently select 15 artists (plus 2 reserves) from all submissions, forming a combined long list of approximately 60 artists. The selectors then meet to discuss the long list and agree a shortlist of at least 12 artists who will show at least three pieces each at the CBP Prize exhibition in Cardiff.
The judges then view the exhibited works in Cardiff to select the prize winner and one highly commended artist.
You can read an insight into the selection process here
The 2024 Contemporary British Painting Prize Selectors
The 2024 Contemporary British Painting Prize Judges
Louisa Buck
Louisa Buck is a writer and broadcaster on contemporary art. She is a Contributing Editor and London Contemporary Art Correspondent for The Art Newspaper and a regular reviewer and commentator on BBC radio and TV.
Her articles have appeared in publications ranging from the Guardian and Vogue to Frieze and Artforum.
She is the author of a number of catalogue essays for institutions including Tate, Whitechapel Gallery, ICA London, MCA Australia and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
Her books include Moving Targets 2: A User’s Guide to British Art Now (Tate 2000); Market Matters: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Art Market (Arts Council England 2004) and Owning Art: The Contemporary Art Collector’s Handbook (co-authored with Judith Greer) (Cultureshock Media 2006). Commissioning Contemporary Art : A Handbook for Curators, Collectors and Artists was published by Thames & Hudson in October 2012 and in 2016 she authored ‘The Going Public Report’ commissioned by Museums Sheffield.
Louisa was a judge for the 2005 Turner Prize and is a founding member of The Gallery Climate Coalition.
Martyn Cross
Martyn Cross is a painter and artist living and working in Bristol, UK. His work has been exhibited at galleries and institutions both nationally and internationally and he was recently shortlisted for The John Moores Painting Prize 2023. He is a Visiting Lecturer at the Apollo Painting School. Recent exhibitions include: All Shall Be Well, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2023); My Assembled Selves, Flatland Projects, Bexhill (2023); The Moth and the Thunderclap, Stuart Shave Modern Art, London (2023); Ares, OHSH Projects at Cromwell Place, London (2023); O, happiness! happiness!, Hales Gallery, London (2022); Roarings Further Out, Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York (2022); Myths of Observation, Hales Gallery, London (2022); Earth Hymns, Ratio 3, San Francisco (2021); Your Foot in My Face, Kingsgate Project Space, London (2021); A Thought Sublime, Marianne Boesky, New York (2021).
Martyn is represented by Hales Gallery, London, and Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York.
photo credit: Charlie Littlewood
Paul Hedge
Paul Hedge was born in Stevenage New Town in 1961 and is the Co-Owner/Founder of Hales London/New York. He studied Fine Art at Goldsmiths college in the early 1980s, gaining a first-class hons degree. He was a co-founder of Scratch Gallery, one of the first artist led spaces in London.
In 1992, after art school and nine years working as a postman, Hedge, along with his business partner Paul Maslin, opened Hales. The gallery produced numerous influential shows in the 1990s with artists including Jake and Dinos Chapman, Mike Nelson and Hew Locke. In 2004 Hales relocated to Shoreditch, and in 2018 opened a gallery in New York’s Chelsea area. Today, the gallery represents a wide array of international artists and is a regular on the international art fair circuit.
During his time in the art world, Hedge has acted as an advisor to many artists and collectors.
The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize Judges
Lubaina Himid MBE
Lubaina Himid (b. 1954, Zanzibar) lives and works in Preston, and is Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Art at the University of Central Lancashire. She is the winner of the 2017 Turner Prize, the 2023 Maria Lassnig Award, and the 2024 Suzanne Deal Booth | Flag Art Foundation Prize. Himid has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. Current exhibitions include Make Do and Mend at Austin Contemporary, Texas, USA and Street Sellers at Greene Neftali, New York. Upcoming solo exhibitions include UCCA, Beijing; The FLAG Art Foundation, New York; and Hollybush Gardens, London. Her work is held in various museum and public collections, including Tate, Museum Victoria & Albert Museum, National Museums Liverpool, and Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
Photo MagdaStawarska Hollybush Gardens
Griselda Pollock
Griselda Pollock is Professor emerita of Social and Critical History of Art and 2020 Laureate of the Holberg Prize for her contribution to feminist studies in art history and the visual arts. She has written extensively on the work of artist-women while developing key concepts for ‘feminist interventions in art’s histories’ (vision and difference, tgenerations and geographies, the virtual feminist museum, differencing the canon) Recent books include Killing Men & Dying Women (Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler in New York painting in the 1950s), Woman in Art ( on refugee feminist art historian Helen Rosenau and her 1944 book of this title), Mary Cassatt (with a new preface) and Medium & Memory—the catalogue of an exhibition curated for HackelBury Fine Art, London, 2023-24 that included paintings and drawings by Judith Tucker.
Harriet Tarlo
Harriet Tarlo’s poetry is published with Shearsman Press, Etruscan books and Guillemot Press. She collaborated for over ten years with the artist Judith Tucker, exhibiting widely here and abroad and publishing five artists’ books with Wild Pansy Press. Her most recent publications are Cut Flowers (2021); with Judith Tucker, Saltwort (2022) and with Kym Martindale, Spillways (2022). She edited the influential anthology The Ground Aslant: An Anthology of Radical Landscape Poetry (Shearsman, 2011). She is a Professor of Ecopoetry and Poetics at Sheffield Hallam University.
There will be three exhibitions: for the first exhibition a minimum of 12 shortlisted artists will be selected to exhibit in BayArt Gallery Cardiff. Each artist will exhibit a minimum of three works chosen by the selection panel.
The second exhibition will take place at Thames-Side Studios Gallery, London, followed by the third exhibition in Huddersfield.
Please read About the prize, How to enter and FAQs carefully before you make your submission.
Deadline for entries: 11.59pm (one minute to midnight) on Monday 1st July 2024.
All artists over 18 and of any nationality, presently living and working in the UK may submit work (see FAQs for further details). Artists represented by Hales Gallery, family members of the judges and selectors, and members of Contemporary British Painting are not eligible to apply.
The entry fee is £25 for all entries and is non-refundable.
All works must be an original creation by the artist. Each artist, by entering the Contemporary British Painting Prize, confirms that they hold all intellectual property rights in the work.
Work entered must be viewed by the judges as being a painting (a visual artwork produced using a paint medium such as oil, tempera, acrylic, emulsion, enamel or watercolour which once completed results in a physical object). Each work should have been completed on or after 1st January 2022.
Work need not be framed, however if selected, the entry will be accepted on the condition that it is entered at your own risk; the organisers will not accept any liability for any loss or damage that may occur in the normal course of handling or display.
The selectors will agree a shortlist of at least 12 artists who will show at least three pieces each at the CBP Prize exhibition in Cardiff. The judges will select one prize winner and one highly commended artist from the exhibited works.
In addition, one artist will be selected for the Blyth Art Gallery exhibition award.
All five works submitted by the artist must be available for the full duration of the exhibition. If a painting is already in a private collection, the owner must have agreed to the loan of the work for the prize exhibition.
Exhibiting artists will each receive a £400 exhibitor’s fee – this may be used to help with costs for travel and accommodation. EXHIBITORS ARE EXPECTED TO ATTEND THE PRIZE ANNOUNCEMENT. Selected artists must arrange delivery of their selected works to BayArt Gallery Cardiff and collection of the paintings from Huddersfield Gallery after the exhibition has closed. The organisers will liaise with the artists to confirm dates and to make arrangements.
Works that are for sale are subject to a 50% commission. Works do not have to be for sale. Shortlisted artists will be contacted by the organisers for details.
Works are insured whilst at Huddersfield. Shortlisted artists will be provided with details on request. Works are NOT insured when in transit or at BayArt or Thames-side Gallery. Artists are therefore advised to arrange their own insurance.
The copyright for all works exhibited in The Contemporary British Painting Prize Show 2024 will remain the property of the artist, but it is a condition of entry that the artist or their representatives agree that ‘Contemporary British Painting’, ‘BayArt Gallery’, ‘Huddersfield Art Gallery’ and ‘Thames-side Gallery’ may reproduce any exhibited works, free of charge, for the purposes of marketing, promotion and education in direct connection with the ‘Contemporary British Painting Prize’, in all media worldwide including exhibition catalogue and subsequent publications, posters, prints, postcards, the Internet and within television programmes, and may license these specific, limited rights to others only for the same purposes.
‘Contemporary British Painting’ also reserves the right to reproduce selected images free of charge for purposes such as displaying information on previous exhibitions on the ‘Contemporary British Painting’ website, ‘@paintbritain’ X, Instagram accounts and ‘Contemporary British Painting’ Facebook site indefinitely, as a public record. The processes of the competition may be filmed, and entering the competition constitutes agreement for a painting to be included in such filming, whether broadcast or not.
Artists submitting their Works to the prize (whether such submission is for an exhibition or any other purpose) shall indemnify and keep indemnified the prize organisers (including their agents and affiliates) against any actions, claims, proceedings, losses, liabilities, charges, costs and expenses which they may incur arising out of or in connection with any actual or alleged financial or contractual arrangements between the artist and any agent (other than the prize organisers) or any third party.
Personal data supplied by the artist on the submission form, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) will only be used for administering the exhibition and for the purposes of the exhibition and continuing promotion of the Work(s). In entering, entrants agree that their contact details will be retained by the organisers of the Contemporary British Painting Prize and these will be added to the mailing lists for Contemporary British Painting, from which is it possible to unsubscribe at any time. The personal data will not be transferred to any other third party without the consent of the artist.
Unless expressly written to the contrary, the artist hereby consents to the organisers providing third parties with his or her contact details where such third parties might be interested in buying, commissioning or licensing the rights in and to, their work(s).
Artists will be notified of the results of their entry by email (please see Key Dates). The selectors’ and judges’ decisions are final and no correspondence will be entered into.
The organisers reserve the right to disqualify any Work if the artist has failed to adhere to these Terms and Conditions.
Dates and/or other arrangements may be subject to change according to prevailing government regulations and restrictions concerning Covid 19 and/or other circumstances beyond the organiser’s control.
The Judith Tucker Memorial Prize
Addendum, 21 June 2024. Entry to the Judith Tucker Memorial Prize is automatic with entry for the Painting Prize. Artists who have already submitted are automatically included. Painters shortlisted for this prize are also eligible for the Contemporary British Painting Prize and the Blyth Gallery Exhibition Award. This prize is open to women artists based in the UK, whose practice explores the relations between memory, place, environment and landscape through contemporary painting. The selectors will choose works that, in their opinion, meet those criteria. The organisers will contact all long-listed artists and ask if they consider themselves to be a woman artist and whether they would like to be considered for this prize.
“The stated aim of Contemporary British Painting is to explore and promote current painting. The subtext to this is giving voice back to the artist, the originator and source of painting. The real discourse around current painting is generated painter to painter and emanates from the studio and not from the boardrooms of institutions, directors’ offices, lecture halls or galleries. This prize is artists submitting themselves to consideration and selection by their peers.”
“The new Contemporary British Painting Prize is a brilliant new initiative that holds up a mirror to the wealth of practice and exciting talent alive in the UK painting scene today.”
The Contemporary British Painting Prize 2024