Our Academy Award, presented each year to an outstanding work in the Annual Open Exhibition, is awarded in recognition of an artist whose work demonstrates exceptional skill in its execution and challenges the definition and purpose of contemporary art.

Only non-Academicians are eligible, meaning any artist selected for the exhibition, including those exhibiting for the first time, could receive the award. This year’s prize of £3000, selected by RWA Academicians, was awarded to Eric Butcher for his works T/R. 1047 and T/R. 1059  

Fiona Robinson, President of the RWA, reflects on Butcher’s work and why his work stood out this year: 
"Eric Butcher has been awarded The Academy Prize for his two works which are contemporary takes on painting. His process and the works themselves constitute an intellectual enquiry into the nature of painting and where it is situated within contemporary art. These beautiful works question both the validity of painting and the inherent consumerism of making art. 
 
‘His paintings are constructed from paint fragments peeled from the surfaces of existing works. They have a stately beauty and yet seem ethereal. They are delicate and apparently fragile and yet encased in glass the paint is preserved, unable to change or move and consequently have an element of three-dimensionality"
 

 
"T/R 1047 2024 and T/R 1059 2025 are part of his Endgame project. He “intends to use only materials already available in the studio, repurposing and recycling without consuming new resources.” He likens them to scientific specimens which collect the ‘natural history’ of his creative past. 
 
The compositions are balanced, repetitive and musical. In an increasingly disintegrating world, the fragmentation and tearing of beautifully modulated surfaces is a calculated act of destruction. Careful repositioning and reconstruction with an almost mathematical precision suggests an attempt, intended or not, to reconfigure the original beauty - an attempt to rationalise a broken world order. 
 
Butcher is philosophically incapable of an act of destruction. It is not mindless destruction; it is repositioning. Like a conservationist unpicking or separating one material from another - the paint layer from the support - it is a slow deliberate action followed by reordering and rebuilding.

Situated in glass at a distance from the backing board the fragments are accompanied by mesmeric shadows which play on the idea of shadows of a former self."

You can see Eric Butcher’s prize-winning work in the 172 Annual Open Exhibition until 28 December 2025.  

Images: Khali Ackford/KoLAB Studios