The $20,000 Guirguis New Art Prize (GNAP17) was presented last Friday in Ballarat. It’s the third instalment of a $100,000 commitment Guirguis has made to the development of new art in Ballarat.

In front of a large crowd at the formal opening at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, judge and senior curator of contemporary art at the National Gallery of Victoria Simon Maidment awarded the prize to Melbourne-based artist Yhonnie Scarce.

Her work The More Bones the Better, 2016, is an installation comprising six medical beakers, tubing & hand blown glass.

“The winning work by Yhonnie Scarce captures the sensitivity to materials she displays throughout her artistic practice,” said Mr Maidment

“The blown and shattered glass elements are a delicate contrast to the shocking and little discussed histories of Aboriginal exploitation and abuse in the name of science in Australia.”

With the presentation of the prize and the recognition of a renewed interest in the arts in Ballarat, The Courier spoke to philanthropist Mr Mark Guirguis about his passion for the arts, the financial and social benefits to the city of a vibrant gallery, and his interest in the development of the arts in Ballarat as chair of the Art Gallery Foundation.

I first started seriously collecting as an intern. I had colleague at the hospital who was going to an art auction, I remember it was a Leonard Joel auction. Whereas previously all these Streetons and all these famous Australian artists you could only see in galleries, I was quite amazed that you could go to an auction house and see all these works of art and get really close and personal with them, and the whole buzz of the auction. 

I actually bought a John Olsen piece at that auction, which was back in about 1992 or 1993. From then I was just quite hooked on going to auctions.

You get drawn into the arts: looking at different forms, looking at different galleries. I think probably travel as well; as you start to travel, you see galleries as being a central part of a city's heritage. I see the gallery as being the city's soul. 

I think the state of the gallery is a mirror of the state of the community. 

I look at the question of ‘what is art?’ 

To me it’s a way of projecting what what are the critical issues within a community and that's really what I'm looking at. I'm trying to interpret the art. One of the fortunate things that I have, being more involved, is actually meeting a lot of artists. 

I love getting artists to talk about the work. It's not the easiest thing, as you know.

I think it's fantastic.I think they’re generally quite interesting people as a broad generalisation. It’s obviously quite removed from my day-to-day job as a surgeon which is quite dogmatic and structured and generally risk averse – I’m sure my patients will love to hear that. 

In art you don't have those confines. You can be a little bit more radical and think outside the square. Take a political view, make statements.

Probably not in the same context. Surgery is often problem solving and then dealing with situations as they arise. You've got to think on your feet a little bit.

I love the idea of art being something you can muse over; you can think about it. Art that you remember is the art you take home from the exhibition. You're thinking about it, you're talking about it.

That can vary from some massive extravaganza, like those shows of the NGV, those Winter Masterpieces, where they are quite dynamic, they're really big; to a small artist’s first show in a small gallery; they’re really excited about it being their first solo show.

Having met some artists, you see the stress they're under in putting themselves out to the world; they're opening themselves up to, and being open to, criticism.

My parents are Egyptian. They moved to Australia when they finished university in Cairo. They came out here in the early 1960s.

When they moved to Australia it was quite a closed society. They were not used to the less obvious community involvement. They were new to the country but they were pretty fluent in English, both university trained.

Just the cultural aspect of people not going out in the evenings; the classic nine-to-five. That Brack Collins Street 5pm painting sums it up: go to work, go home, close the door and that’d be it.

They’ve seen that open up. Australia has become more multicultural and there's a lot more happening on the street and in the city. I still remember being a kid and being in the city at 5 o'clock Friday afternoon. The shops were closed, you could walk through the streets without seeing a car. Now we’ve embraced that night culture and cafe culture and it's really vibrant.

I was born in East Melbourne and we grew up in North Balwyn. Classic Melbourne suburb.

My parents actually bought a farm, because my father is a genetic engineer and he started getting into some experiments in terms of his background. He's a researcher and we had a farm in Toolern Vale.

We lived initially at the farm, but then it was too hard to travel so we moved to Melton and I went to school at Essendon Grammar. I really enjoyed school and from there I got into medicine and went to Monash University, lived on campus at Monash. 

That’s a pretty critical period in your life, meeting with other medical students and getting into the hospital stream. That's when your horizons tend to expand, so for me going and living on campus was that real sort of cultural expansion. It was really formative.

I have a younger brother, there’s about seven years between us. It's interesting; it is a big gap. I always felt like an only child. We were never at school together and we have quite divergent lives.

My wife and I moved to Ballarat in 2005. We'd previously been living in London. After I finished my surgical training I did some further training in the UK. We had a great life there and we have very fond memories of being in London.

It was really a leap of faith for me. I decided I didn’t want to work in Melbourne, I wanted to be in a regional area. I was fortunate getting a role here setting up the Head and Neck Cancer Service. It was a great opportunity for a young surgeon. We're very lucky, I think, here in Ballarat.  We’ve got a great medical service here.

But we came here, we said ‘we'll give it six months and see how we go’. We just loved it from day one. I love Ballarat, the community. It's a great size; it’s got all the infrastructure. We’ve been quite passionate about supporting Ballarat.

Funnily enough it was another patient. We got chatting and I think he knew I was interested in the arts a little bit and he said, “Oh you should come to an art auction,” that they held through the Art Academy. I went to one of their student art auctions and it was amazing.

I didn't know that there was an art academy in Ballarat, and at that time a couple of the lecturers had donated some works to be auctioned as well. I bought a Doug Wright. Doug was one of the lecturers at the University of Ballarat and we got chatting about the arts and Ballarat and I said, ‘this is amazing that no one knows about this art school here in Ballarat.’

The art academy was geographically adjacent to the (Ballarat Art) Gallery but the two didn't really seem to have any association – and it’s still a struggle now to some degree. I think that the two are symbiotic but they don't seem to have a close correlation, which is historical.

Doug Wright and I talked about changing that. I felt the gallery was under-appreciated by the community – you know this amazing institution: you walk in and you see the works there; you see the building and the location and the collection, but it wasn’t appreciated by the wider community and the region.

And talking to Doug, that was really the genesis of the GNAP. Through the through Federation Uni and through Shelley (Hinton, curator of the Post Office Gallery) and through Peter Matthews (previous head of the Art Academy) we wanted the prize to support the arts in the region, and we were talking about having fellowships or sending people away.

An art prize was the thing we finally decided on.

One of the things I feel is challenging within the arts in Ballarat and within the Gallery is there’s quite a big focus on the historical aspect of Australian art and using it as an historical measure.

I think that’s fantastic and critical, it plays a critical role; but perhaps there wasn't as much engagement with younger artists; with the contemporary side. So we felt a way to draw the Art Academy and the Gallery closer together would be to have a contemporary art prize; hence the GNAP.

It’s new art; it uses what is called ‘intermedia’; joining different media to produce art. It can be sound and light as well as traditional painting, photography sculpture – all those things and the way they combine. ‘

It's representative of the leaders of contemporary art around the country. Shelley Hinton speaks to a lot of the contemporary galleries from all over the country and asks, “Who is really getting into intermedia, this innovative use of media?”

Each of the galleries, both commercial and public galleries, put up artists they think appropriate and then there's a selection panel and that gets trimmed down. Then we have the finalists, hence the GNAP.

Absolutely. I think there's been a great growth in engagement with the Gallery. The Gallery has really tried hard to support community exhibitions and community artists. I know Gordon (Morrison, AGB director) is very proud of the fact that compared to other regional galleries, we support regional artists; we support artists from the region rather than just bringing shows from overseas or whatever.

I mean there's a need for that, there's a need for blockbusters, but the Gallery has really tried to support local artists and local shows and local exhibitions, or artists who have an association with the region.

I think it's about getting the message out through the Art Gallery Foundation of which I’m the chair, trying to create events that bring people into the gallery. That’s one of my passions, to try and open the gallery up to segments of the community who are too intimidated to come in or have felt there's nothing to draw them into the gallery. I think that's changing.

Certainly something like the Archibald (Prize) is fantastic because it just shows what a blockbuster can do in terms of getting people into a gallery. One of the things I've heard over and over again with the Archibald is there are people coming into the Gallery for the first time and I think the Gallery’s encouraging in saying, “this is the Archibald but perhaps come upstairs and have a look at our permanent collection?” and people are doing that and are just universally blown away by the depth of the collection.

I think that's the challenge. To get people in. 

Fortunately with the Foundation were able to purchase the building adjacent to the gallery.

That provides the potential for expansion into the future. Galleries are all about being able to show the works in their collection, and that's the great challenge we have. It's a pretty big building; compared to a lot of galleries it's a very big building.

I think it's one of the great hidden gems from an architectural point of view, just the size of the building. One of the comments I hear when people come upstairs and see the Oddie, see the Williamson out the back, that great new wing –  that great story, funded by the community; a lot of philanthropic support for that gallery.

It's a great building but there's never enough space. I find it really exciting that we have the potential to get into the new iteration of the gallery in the future. That's hugely exciting. It will be a challenge for the next director to try to expand the space and to modernize the space and to make it more open.

One of the challenges with the gallery is that it dates back to the early Twentieth Century. Small doors, small windows. If you look at current galleries: a lot of glass, they’re really open. The challenge is to draw people in. How you do that in the context of a historical building is always a challenge. As a building it’s a great public space. I’d love to see it as a public space as well as being a gallery.

Just as art is a manifestation of prevailing attitudes of the time, I’d love the gallery to become admired and a space that the community is really proud of. That's one of the things I'm really passionate about.

Visit the Art Gallery of Ballarat’s GNAP 17 site here.