A Brisbane artist and resident has taken out the coveted Foot Locker Art Prize, picking up both the major prize ($50,001), People’s Choice ($1,500) and a pair of customised shoes inspired by his artwork last night at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Kalin Thompson, 24, was awarded the prizes at an Exhibition of the 25 finalists on Thursday night in the home of the Archibald Prize—which was trumped by one dollar back in April this year with the launch of the Foot Locker Art Prize and consequently shook up the Art world. Labelled a ‘masterpiece’ by judges, Kalin’s ‘Forbidden Fruit’ acrylic painted entry featured the Nike Air Force 1—one of eight shoe templates that were available to entrants, also including Converse, Puma and adidas—and was created in 420 hours and features 190 shoes and 60 shoeboxes.

The winning work, click to enlarge

UK artist and Art Prize judge, Dave White, said of the winning artwork, “When I first saw it, it really was outstanding. It really did shine. The level of detail immediately screamed out to me, but more importantly it really demonstrated an incredible skill set and it also showed a wonderful use of colour. But then the more you looked at this piece as a work of art, it really did start to unveil itself as something that had a really nice narrative behind it. And the more you got into it, you saw this really chaotic camouflage and you really started to appreciate the incredible level of detail. I think if Nike decided to release that it would stand up as a design on its own, but the more I looked at the depth of the piece, the more I saw the story behind it, it was quite a clever concept. It really was about embracing this competition fully, about using sneakers as a piece of art and as a platform to create something very original.”

The Foot Locker Art Prize: The World’s Richest Colouring Competition was open for three months and attracted over 6,000 entries which were narrowed down to 20 Australian and five New Zealand finalists.