Victoria Riechelt is highly regarded as a young artist in Australia. Recently she has been awarded an Australia Council New Work Grant and the people's choice prizes in both the RBS Emerging Artist Award and the Metro Art Award. Victoria also won the Linden Innovators Award 2008, an award that saw her travel to the 2009 Venice Biennale in the year following. Her meticulous, highly detailed photo realist painting is at the forefront of the contemporary painting movement in Australian art and she engages whole-heartedly with modern issues through her mastery of a traditional technique. Reichelt's work has been included in the exhibitions Covered at the Canberra Contemporary Art Space, the Red Exhbition at the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation and Contemporary Australia: Optimism at the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Brisbane.
Read MoreReichelt is interested in the imminent redundancy of objects, having previously drawing inspiration from antique cameras and outdated sound systems. Continuing and developing this field of interest, Reichelt's recent work looks at the redundancy of magazines. With the recent popularity of iPads and Kindles, Reichelt believes that the days of seeing piles of magazines on coffee tables are numbered. Magazines function differently from books (which Reichelt has previously explored widely in her painting practice); most people tend to have a fondness for books, verging on a protectiveness, which they don’t hold for their more disposable cousins. Australians are one of the highest consumers of magazines per capita in the world and Reichelt is interested in exploring the cultural shifts that might occur with their disappearance.
