The Percivals 2026

Sasha Grishin:

When I came to judge The Percival Painting Prize, I quite literally stood in front of every painting for about two minutes. And two minutes is actually quite a long time, but I wanted to give the artist a chance to be able to speak to me about what she was doing in the work, what she was trying to achieve, and how it all came together.

After a little bit of time, I started coming back more and more to this painting here, which I may not have initially noticed when I flick through it in the various digital reproductions. It's a painting by an artist based in Brisbane called Elena Churilova.

Now what is the painting? Initially, when you first look at it, it looks like some handsome young man on a street looking at his mobile phone. But then, gosh, there's certain things become slightly incongruous.

There seems to be a dingo here, marking territory. There seem to be ibises strolling across the road. And gosh, what's happening here? You've got very, very faintly preserved lines of text. It looks almost like a student enrolment card coming through.

Oh no wait a second, we're not actually looking at an image of someone walking, looking at their smartphone. We're actually looking at perhaps a selfie. And these other paths are starting to intrude to it, because when you think about it, the smartphone has really revolutionised the way we look at the external world. We've got so much information coming in from so many different quarters. It's all almost overpowering.

But I think what Churilova does in her work, she also asks this rather subtle question, ‘is the smartphone also starting  to erode our personality? Is it eroding our identity? Are we no longer who we are?’

And so the moment you then suddenly realise this thing, gosh, this painting is operating on so many different levels, asking so many questions that if you go beyond the mandatory nine seconds that you normally spend in a gallery looking at a work.

And if you go as far as spending, say, two minutes, which is a major investment of time, the painting was going to feed all sorts of information to you.

And then think of it, it's a very humble medium, the watercolour. But isn't it brilliantly done. This is an artist who actually knows her craft well. You notice even say the paper here is shown shining through, so the surfaces are also floating on top. And just look at this sort of this very, very wonderful stubble work. Little air bubbles going through the work.

So once you start to engage yourself more and more with the work, the more you realise you're looking at little sort of miracles of paint. And at that stage you're saying, ‘wow, this is an incredibly well-made work, isn't it? This is really quite exciting.’

And not knowing the artist and I had heard of her before, I thought possiblythis is a really important work. And also look at the way it's framed. It's a very old-fashioned frame, but in some ways it's taking the image that we're looking here from this created world and separating it from the real world of the gallery space.

So for me, it's a painting that operates on many, many levels, and I'm positive I’ve only scratched the surface. But should I spend a bit more time with it? And I do want to do that. I'll find more and more things about it.

And I'm hoping that visitors to the gallery who come and see it will also just get that little bit of excitement of what Elena Churilova’s achieved in her work,
and what she refers to as the Smartphonisation of our world.

And she's not critical. She's not putting up the sign of a Luddite destroy smartphones. But she's rather saying the smartphones AI. Should we think a little bit more about how they're impacting on us and our identity as human beings Where does it actually leave us? And for a painting to achieve all of that is pretty good, I think.