Australia’s Julie Fragar Takes Home 100K Archibald Prize for ‘Reality-Transcending’ Portraiture

Julie Fragar b. 1977, Australia Follow +

Brisbane artist Julie Fragar broke down crying upon hearing she had won Australia's leading prize for portraiture.

Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) today announced Fragar would take home the $100,000 AUD Archibald Prize for her portrait of artist and colleague Justene Williams. 

The four-time finalist said portrait painting wasn’t taken as seriously in the 1990s as it is today.

‘You work your whole career imagining this might happen one day,’ she said. ‘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.’

The winning work Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene) (2025) is a portrait depicting her co-worker hovering in space surrounded by her artworks and her daughter Honore.

‘The work is a reflection on the experience of making art to deadlines, and the labour and love of being a mother,’ Fragar said.

Fragar was chosen from a list of 57 finalists, including Yankunytjatjara artist Kaylene Whiskey, Sydney painter Natasha Walsh, and Australian artist Jason Phu.

AGNSW director Maud Page praised Fragar for her ‘sumptuous ability to transcend reality and depict her subjects technically but also psychologically’.

The decision was announced alongside the winners of the Wynne Prize for landscape painting or figurative sculpture and Sulman Prize for subject or genre painting and murals.

Three-time Wynne finalist Jude Rae received the $50,000 Wynne Prize for her oil on linen Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal (2025)—of the titular view ahead of sunrise.

Meanwhile, Katoomba artist Gene A’Hern took home the $40,000 Sulman Prize for Sky painting (2025), a fiery abstraction referencing his home in the Blue Mountains.

‘Art Gallery of New South Wales has played such a big role in the birth of my practice, as I have regularly spent time there,’ A’Hern said. ‘To be awarded the Sulman Prize is a great honour and I feel very humbled to stand alongside such talented Australian artists.’

Works by finalists in all three prizes will be exhibited at AGNSW from 10 May to 17 August 2025. Archibald Prize finalist works will then tour venues in New South Wales and Victoria through to next July. —[O]

Main image: Exhibition view, Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney (10 May–17 August 2025). Photo: © AGNSW, Diana Panuccio.