Julie Fragar has won the 2025 Archibald prize for her portrait of her fellow artist Justene Williams.
Announced as the winner of the $100,000 prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales on Friday, Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene) was selected unanimously by the judges from 904 entries and 57 finalists.
Fragar is just the 13th woman to win the prize in its 104-year history; this is the 15th time the Archibald has been given to a woman, with Judy Cassab and Del Kathryn Barton having won it twice.
Accepting her prize, Fragar, a four-time Archibald finalist, said she had chosen to paint Williams “for three reasons: she’s a dear friend, as a great artist and to capture her otherworldliness”.
Fragar and Williams work together at the Queensland College of Art and Design where Fragar is head of painting and Williams is head of sculpture.
The artist told Guardian Australia that the pair had just one sitting, during which Williams posed for photographs. Fragar then spent three months in the studio painting.
Williams did not seen the portrait until Friday, with Fragar describing her as “an incredibly trusting subject”.
“The way I start to make paintings of someone is to get an energy from them, and Justene’s energy is the energy of a conjurer,” she said.
Asked if she would ever return the favour and paint Fragar, Williams told Guardian Australia: “I can’t paint. I could make a sculpture, perhaps … or I would invite Julie into a performance with me.”
Of her win, Fragar said: “Visual arts careers have many ups and downs so, after 20 years of practice, one learns not to be too hopeful about these things. And as somebody who’s judged a lot of prizes too, I know things can go either way. There’s many works in this show that could have won.”
The Archibald, Australia’s most prestigious portraiture prize, is awarded to the best portrait of a person “distinguished in art, letters, science or politics” painted by an Australian resident, and has been running since 1921.
Alongside the Archibald, the $50,000 Wynne prize for landscape painting and figurative sculpture was also awarded on Friday, to Jude Rae for her painting Pre-dawn Sky over Port Botany Container Terminal.
The Sydney artist, who has been a three-time Wynne finalist, said the painting depicted “what I see from my bathroom window, four flights up from Redfern Hill” – looking towards Sydney’s Botany Bay, the geographical birthplace of colonial Australia, on a sightline that was once the corridor used by Aboriginal people to access the bay.
“I see the lights of the container terminal blazing away 24/7, looking very small beneath the vastness of the sky,” Rae said, accepting her prize.
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The $40,000 Sulman prize for genre, subject and mural painting, went to Gene A’Hern for Sky Painting. The artist, who hails from Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, used oil and oil stick on board for the work, which he said was “about home and place”.
A record 2,394 entries were received across the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes this year, with more than 70% of finalists across the three awards being female artists.
More than a third of this year’s 57 Archibald finalists were painted by first-time nominees.
Celebrity sitters were a minority; instead, artists dominated as subjects, with a dozen finalists being self-portraits and 22 being portraits of another artist.
Last week the artist Abdul Abdullah won the $3,000 packing room prize category – decided by the AGNSW staff who hang the paintings each year – for his portrait of artist Jason Phu, also a finalist this year.
Abdullah’s playful painting, titled No mountain high enough, depicted Phu sitting astride a horse.
The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman finalists’ paintings all go on public display at the AGNSW from Saturday until 17 August.
The Archibald works will then head to Geelong, Gosford, Muswellbrook, Mudgee, Shoalhaven and Coffs Harbour later this year and in 2026.
