Ryan Presley Wins £50k First Nations Art Prize with Renaissance-Inspired ‘Masterpiece’

Marri Ngarr artist Ryan Presley has won the $100,000 AUD (£52,000) Telstra Art Award at the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art Awards (NATSIAA), Australia’s longest running and most prestigious First Nations art prize, for Our Lifestyle of Tranquility Undisturbed (2026).

The winning oil painting places a young Indigenous man at the centre of a grand, Renaissance-inspired setting. Drawing particularly on Italian Mannerist Domenico Beccafumi’s The Annunciation (1545), Presley combines the visual language of the European canon with distinctly Australian imagery: a hunting rifle, dark water and a distant bushfire.

His engagement with European art history also has a personal dimension: his grandfather trained as a sculptor in Rome before immigrating from Scandinavia to Australia in the 1960s, and was an early creative influence on Presley. The jury praised the work for bringing together “diverse cultural, cross cultural and art history references”, while curator Shannon Brett described it as a “masterpiece”.

The painting continues Presley’s longstanding interest in how images and systems of power shape ideas of value, history and identity. Australia’s National Portrait Gallery describes his practice as engaging with “themes of power and dominion,” particularly religion and economic control in colonialism and empire.

His earlier Blood Money series, begun in 2010, replaced portraits on Australian banknotes with First Nations figures, while his 2024 commission Paradise, won at the National Portrait Gallery, reworked Western religious imagery to explore colonial legacies and First Nations resistance.

In an interview with the Guardian, the artist said: “I wanted to put in the anachronism, this mixing of timelines … a past, present and future overlay. We see in western artworks how they set out archetypes … I really like that idea of translating that … and sort of redirecting and changing.”

The win marks Presley’s third NATSIAA appearance, having been named a finalist in 2016 and 2020, and comes amid an expansive year for the artist.

At Cairns Indigenous Art Fair in July, he presented Inferno (2025), an arcade-style video game in which players navigate a landscape of surveillance and mineral extraction, using boomerangs to disrupt mining-survey helicopters and liberate water supplies. The work extends his political concerns into a distinctly contemporary medium, treating gaming as a platform for First Nations storytelling and critique.

The award exhibition brings together 64 finalists at the Museum and Art Gallery of the Northern Territory in Darwin through 24 January 2027.