Lecturer scoops pounds 30,000 art prize

A UNIVERSITY LECTURER has won the pounds 30,000 Jerwood Painting Prize. Madeleine Strindberg received the award last night from Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

The prize was set up by the Jerwood Foundation to celebrate painting, and has been seen as countering the Turner Prize's disregard of representational art.

The shortlist covered painters whose ages ranged from their 30s to their 60s. Ms Strindberg is in her 30s. Ten years ago she was artist in residence at the National Gallery.

The paintings commended by the judges for this prize derive from her preoccupation with the human body, and started with the purchase of an Italian medical textbook on the human brain.

The judges said: "The paintings are delicate, thinly washed yellow and silver. Pretty though they appear on first impression, these shapes in fact represent detailed slices of the human brain, beautiful yet also menacing."

Ms Strindberg is senior lecturer in fine art at the University of Brighton. She trained at Byam Shaw School of Art, Goldsmiths' College in London and the Royal College of Art.

An exhibition of all the 10 shortlisted artists opens today and runs until November at the new Jerwood Gallery in Union Street, London SE1. In addition to Ms Strindbergthe shortlisted artists include Basil Beattie, Richard Beck, Andrew Bick, Alan Brooks, Claude Heath, David Leapman, Edwina Leapman, Chris Ofili and William Tillyer.