Julie Fragar wins the Archibald for a portrait among the stars
- Written by Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
Beatrice Gralton, who curated this year’s Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes, has hung the exhibition well. Julie Fragar’s Archibald-winning portrait of her friend and fellow artist Justene Williams is impossible to miss in the central court of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
Fragar’s subject bursts out of the central space, as though she is herself the Big Bang that created the Universe. This is the artist as the Creator of All Things, the governor of a world that extends from her hands. Behind her are the stars from whence she may have come.
Her face is grave, but severe – governing the multiverse is a serious task. She hovers above the figures she has created, including her daughter, Honore, who has also inspired many of Williams’ works. Honore appears in the painting twice, first as a tiny child looking up, and then as an eight-year-old, half-hidden behind the assortment of objects and detritus that Williams uses to make her art.
The title, Flagship Mother Multiverse, comes from Williams’ recent New Zealand installation work, Making Do Rhymes With Poo, best described as an endurance piece where the artist used her own body to make a series of works.
By painting in monochrome, Fragar enables the viewer to focus first on the subject, before taking in the details of the confusion of the elements beneath her. Her dress, quietly captioned “Flag ship Mother” (with “mother” printed in verso), reinforces that this mother, who makes all things, is indeed captain of her ship.
The Wynne prize and urban beauty
Much of the time, the Australian landscape is imagined as bush, desert, or lush pastoral land. Winner of the Wynne prize, Jude Rae’s painting Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal, celebrates the accidental moments of urban beauty. The artist lives in Redfern where, high on the hill, it is possible to see the lights of the Botany Bay container terminal: a place that never sleeps.
The Wynne prize is awarded to a landscape painting or figure sculpture, and Rae has painted her urban landscape just at that moment where the sky blushes a faint pink, turning to dark blue, before the almost black of the night sky.
There are no stars to be seen in the city sky. They are blotted out by the dazzling multicoloured lights of the machines that govern the movement of goods and services, the creators of wealth in our artificial landscape.
The surface of Rae’s painting is disconcertingly flat, as though the paint is embedded within the canvas. It could almost have been created by her transferring her thoughts, rather than paint, onto the canvas.
‘Nature’s gestures’ in the Sulman
The calm of Rae’s approach is in marked contrast to the exuberant painterly style of Gene A'Hern’s Sky Painting, which has been awarded the Sir John Sulman Prize for “subject painting, genre painting or mural project”.
In his time, Sir John Sulman was one of the more reactionary gallery trustees, calling the modern art of the 1920s and ‘30s “awful rubbish”.
It does seem somewhat ironic that the prize that bears his name has consistently been awarded to more adventurous entries.
Unlike the Archibald and Wynne Prizes, which must be judged by the gallery’s trustees, the Sulman is judged by an artist, a different one every year. This year the judge was Elizabeth Pulie. While A'Hern’s work could hardly be described as decorative in the same way as Pulie’s, it does have a strong sense of colour and rhythm in a way that maybe spoke to her.
A'Hern describes his painting as conveying a sense of “nature’s gestures”, of the different elements of sight and sound that combine to form the country of the Blue Mountains that is his home.
His description of his prizewinning painting – as well as its appearance, with gloriously curving gestural elements – are a reminder that the barriers between the different categories in this annual festival of art are best described as “fluid”.
While I was in the crowd waiting for the announcement, I was asked to define “subject painting, genre painting or mural project”. The truth of the matter is that all categories are blurred and, with the exception of portraiture, are interchangeable.
The definition of portraiture, as established by Mr Justice Roper in the court case brought against the trustees in 1944, still stands. A portrait is “a pictorial representation of a person, painted by an artist”. A landscape, however, may represent a photographically accurate representation of a place, or a feeling about that place. A genre or subject painting may show people, or not. It may express objects, or emotions. A mural is simply a painting on a wall.
Although both Sydney and Melbourne sport many murals on laneway walls, it is many years since a mural has won the Sulman, which is a great pity.
After the television crews and crowds of journalists had departed, I returned to the gallery for a final look at Fragar’s prizewinning portrait. It was still lit up by the lights for the cameras. It struck me then that this image would make an excellent mural – or perhaps a giant projection in the sky of a woman making a universe, using the power of her mind.
Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2025 exhibition is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until August 17.
Authors: Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne
