Julie Fragar Wins 2025 Archibald Prize
186May 10, 2025
TheArt Gallery of New South Wales(AGNSW) on May 9 named Julie Fragar the winner of the 2025Archibald Prize. The award is presented annually in recognition of the best portrait of an individual “distinguished in art, letters, science or politics” painted by an Australian resident. Fragar, who lives and works in Brisbane, won the AU$100,000 prize (US$64,000), for her oil-on-canvas portrait of sculptor and performance artist Justene Williams. A four-time finalist, she is the thirteenth woman to receive the honor since its 1921 founding.
TitledFlagship Mother Multiverse (Justene), Fragar’s work shows Williams floating amid a field of stars and above a jumble of mannequin-like figures. The portrait, for which Williams sat just once, according toThe Guardian, references Williams’s practice involving what Fragar characterizes as “a multiverse of characters and events that confront the relentless weirdness we go through en route to the other side,” as well as a recent endurance work by Williams about “the labor of getting by,” said Fragar, who noted that for Justene, “that means the labor of a day job . . . of making art to deadlines, and the labor (and love) of being a mother.”
Jude Rae won the AU$50,000 Wynne Prize, given annually for a landscape painting or figurative sculpture depicting Australian scenery. She was honored for her oil-on-linen paintingPre-dawn Sky over Port Botany Container Terminal,which portrays the distant gantry lights of the terminal as seen from her home in the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern. Botany Bay, or Kamay, is the geographical birthplace of colonial Australia; the sightline from Rae’s window traces a corridor traditionally used by Aboriginal people to access the bay.
Gene A’Hern, of Katoomba, won the AU$40,000 Sulman Prize for hisSky Painting, a vivid, swirling oil-and-oil-stick-on-board work that he described as conveying “a sensation of nature’s gestures, composed to resonate from within, translating an omnipresence that comes from dust and returns to dust.” The honor is awarded in recognition of a subject painting, genre painting, or mural project.
The AGNSW’s AU$3,000 Packing Room Prize, the winner of which is chosen by museum staff who receive, unpack, and hang the Archibald Prize entries, was handed out last week. Abdul Abdullahof Sydney won for his portrait of fellow artist Jason Phu astride a horse, titledNo mountain high enough.
The winning works are on view at AGNSW alongside of those by the finalists for all three prizes through August 17, after which the exhibition will travel to other Australian cities into 2026.