Arts grads earn national recognition

Dil Hildebrand has won this year’s $25,000 grand prize in the Royal Bank of Canada’s Canadian Painting Competition.

The Winnipeg-born Hildebrand is one of the artists at the galerie Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain in Montreal, a gallery committed to photo-based work, drawing, sculpture, installation art, and related works on paper. He did his BFA at Concordia, and is currently doing his master’s.

With a total of $55,000 in prize money, the RBC Canadian Painting Competition has the largest prize of any painting competition in Canada. Semi-finalists in the competition will have their work displayed at prominent art galleries across the country and featured in Canadian Art magazine and at www.rbc.com/paintingcompetition and at www.canadianart.ca.

Matthew Brown, a recent Concordia MFA grad, was one of two runners-up, and two other Concordia BFA grads, Nicolas Grenier and Martin Golland, were among the 15 winners. Moreover, another important Canadian competition in the visual arts, the Sobey Prize, has BFA grad Matthew Reichertz on its five-artist shortlist.