“I never really expect to win rather I am always amazed at being included,” he said. 

“I was totally amazed to be selected as a finalist this time around especially as the work was called ‘Pernicious’.”

Mr Nivison was reflecting on the current unrest in the world when he created this year’s finalist painting.

“Sometimes the things mankind does in the name of progress, religion or the greater good, for itself and the planet beggar belief,” he said. “It makes me think of a virus, a particularly virulent one. Watching the news from the Middle East, looking on with dismay as centuries of architecture or culture are reduced to rubble, and lives to dust, I feel that perhaps mankind resembles a virus that is pernicious and all-consuming.”

Mr Nivisons’ work has been entered in the competition more than ten times and has been selected as a finalist nine times. In 2002 he won the Wynne Prize with his work ‘Remembering Rain’.  

“I don't enter myself but rather my gallery Utopia Art Sydney enters for me when they think that they have an appropriate work,” said Mr Nivison.

 “If my gallery decides to enter me again I will be happy to say yes.”

The winning work this year was ‘Antara’ by the artist Betty Kuntiwa Pumani.

Antara in South Australia is an extremely important site for Betty Kuntiwa Pumani and her family. Antara is her mother’s country. 

This place and its significant maku (witchetty grub) were a constant in the paintings of her mother, the late Kunmanara Pumani.

Betty’s signature reds evoke the rocky desert country of Antara, while simultaneously suggesting blood or viscera and an unmistakable energy. The contrasting areas of white and its subtle tonal shifts are a quiet and patient counterpoint to the pulsating reds.

So what did Mr Nivison think of this year’s winning work?

“I thought that the winner of the Wynne this year was a good painting, not a great one but netherless a deserved winner,” he said.

“The main room of the Wynne exhibition was given over to an entire indigenous hang and it looked amazing. Though because of the segregation of the hang it took the edge off such a celebrative win by leaving the door open to unnecessary negative comments.”