Amelia Stein has been announced as the winner of the 2018 RCSI Art Award. The prize, awarded to the artist for her work ‘Brig Gen Jimmy Flynn (retd) DSM’, was presented by Mr Kenneth Mealy, President of RCSI (Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland) at a ceremony which took place in the Royal Hibernian Academy (RHA)

Now in its third year, the RCSI Art Award was established to celebrate the common heritage of RCSI and the RHA and the long-standing association between art, medicine and wellbeing.

The artwork was selected from more than 600 works that were on display at the 188th RHA Annual Exhibition. The winning artwork ‘Brig Gen Jimmy Flynn (retd) DSM’ was originally commissioned as part of a collaboration between Amelia Stein and the Military Archives as part of the Military Archives Oral History Project (MAOHP) which aims to record memory, oral history and tradition associated with the Defence Forces. As part of the prize, the winning artist will receive a commission for a new work to be displayed on RCSI’s campus.

Professor Cathal Kelly, Chief Executive/ Registrar, RCSI said: "The RCSI Art Award is a celebration of the common heritage of the RCSI and RHA and the long-standing association between art, medicine and wellbeing. We are delighted to present the prize to Amelia Stein for this inspirational and meticulous portrait. We look forward to working with the artist to create a new work for the RCSI campus that will inspire our future healthcare leaders and evoke a sense of wellbeing for all who observe it."

Both RCSI (1784) and the RHA (1823) have Georgian origins and are 32-county bodies with educational roles. RCSI was occupied, while the RHA was destroyed in the Easter Rising of 1916 and the RCSI Art Award was established to coincide with the centenary of these historic events.

Open to all artists working in paint, drawing, print, sculpture, photography and architecture, the RHA Annual Exhibition attracts a large public and critical audience with 48,000 visitors last year.

The successful artist was awarded €5,000 and the RCSI silver medal and will also receive a commission to the value of €10,000 for a new work for the RCSI collection.

All works of art, in any medium, selected for the 188th RHA Annual Exhibition were considered for the RCSI Art Award. The other shortlisted works were: ‘Venus of Holles Street’ by Jason Ellis, ‘Extraverted’ by Killian Schurmann, ‘Seeing Red’ by Taffina Flood; and ‘Buoyed’ by Michael Quane RHA.

RCSI is ranked among the top 250 (top 2%) of universities worldwide in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2018) and its research is ranked first in Ireland for citations. It is an international not-for-profit health sciences institution, with its headquarters in Dublin, focused on education and research to drive improvements in human health worldwide. RCSI is a signatory of the Athena SWAN Charter.