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Triptych wins Ifor Davies Award at the National Eisteddfod 2012.
I was very honoured to win the Ivor Davies award at Y Lle Celf at this years National Eisteddfod in the Vale of Glamorgan.
The Ifor Davies award is given to the work at the National Eisteddfod that conveys the spirit of activism in the struggle for language, culture and politics in Wales. It gave me a deep sense of pride to receive this.
Dyfernir Gwobr Ifor Davies am y gwaith yn yr Arddangosfa Agored sy'n cyfleu ysbryd y frwydr dros iaith, diwylliant a gwleidyddiaeth Cymru. On i'n mor falch.
This is how one of the selectors Declan McGonagle described the work:
'Anthony Rhys plays with a sense of social and art traditions and with the idea of being oppressed by those traditions. His small scale paintings are of ‘historical’ figures in rigid, fixed poses – straight from the origins of photography in the 19th century – who are depicted as laughing hysterically or crying but still holding the rigid pose of a family photograph. It’s as if the weight of history and tradition and adherence to convention is too great to bear without losing your sanity. These works cross conventions of painting and photography and represent the artist’s awareness of discipline tradition but, crucially, they disrupt expectations by a single simple but powerful shift in the depicted reality.'