Julie Fragar has won the 2025 Archibald Prize for Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene), her portrait of fellow artist Justene Williams. Fragar takes home the $100,000 prize in Australia’s most coveted art award.
“Justene is incredible,” Fragar says of the multidisciplinary Brisbane artist, who she works with at the Queensland College of Art and Design, where Fragar is the head of painting and Williams is the head of sculpture. “I feel very fortunate that she allowed me to do this portrait. There is nobody like her. The work is a reflection on the experience of making art to deadlines, and the labour and love of being a mother.”
This is Fragar’s fourth time as an Archibald finalist. “You work your whole career imagining this might happen one day,” she says. “Thinking back to myself as a 17 year old showing up at the Sydney College of the Arts—a kid from country New South Wales—it’s incredible to think I have won the Archibald Prize. Portrait painting wasn’t taken as seriously in the 1990s as it is today. I have always regarded the Archibald Prize as a place that understood the value of portraiture.”
This year, the Art Gallery of New South Wales received 2,393 entries across the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes and for the first time there are more finalist works by women artists than men in each of the prizes. Fragar is the 13th woman to win the prize since its inception in 1921.
Meanwhile Jude Rae has won the $50,000 Wynne Prize for her painting Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal. This award celebrates the best landscape painting of Australian scenery or figurative sculpture. This year’s Wynne Prize finalists can be found here.
And Gene A’Hern has won the $40,000 Sulman Prize for his work Sky painting. Entries for the Sulman Prize reached a record high this year, with 732 total. The award acknowledges the best subject painting, genre painting or mural project. All Sulman Prize finalists are here.
The Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes are run by the Art Gallery of New South Wales. All winning and finalist works will be showing at the gallery between 10 May—17 August.
Archibald Prize 2025 finalist works will then tour to regional galleries across Victoria and New South Wales until September 2026, see the full list of galleries and dates here.
Wynne Prize 2025 finalist works will tour regional New South Wales until June 2026, see the full list of galleries and dates here.
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