Art prize winner: pill packets in Perspex box

Akiko Diegel's artwork 'Cure'. Photo / Supplied

A Perspex box full of discarded aspirin packets has won top award at the 20th Wallace Art Awards.

Akiko Diegel won the paramount award with her work Cure - made of Disprin encased in Perspex. She won a six-month residency to study art in New York.

Last night's awards, held at the Pah Homestead in the TSB Bank Wallace Arts Centre, were judged by New Zealand artists Philip Trusttum, Sara Hughes and Peter Gibson-Smith.

In other awards, Brydee Rood won a three-month residency in San Francisco with the Fulbright-Wallace trust award for her live installation performance Mull Ballon Wolke Kanal Projekt which included a three-person kayak.

Matt Ellwood won a three-month residency in Solothurn, Switzerland, for for his work, Unconditional Love, made of plywood and dowel.

This year's competition received 559 entries, from which 117 entries were selected as finalists.

Fifty-six of the entries, including the winners, will be displayed in the Travelling Show at the Pah Homestead before it moves to The Dowse in Lower Hutt from the end of next month.

The rest enter the Salon des Refuses exhibition at the homestead, which is in Hillsborough, Auckland.

The Wallace Art Awards were established 20 years ago by art collector James Wallace and are the longest surviving and richest annual art awards of their kind in Australasia, worth more than $165,000 to winners.