Matt Adnate’s Baker Boy Wins AGNSW’s Packing Room Prize 2024

Awarded not by museum directors or curators but the staff who receive, unpack, and hang the works, the Australian portraiture prize is a gale-force gust of fresh air.

The Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) today announced the winner of the 33rd annual Packing Room Prize.

Matt Adnate won for his painting of Indigenous Australian rapper Baker Boy, titled Rhythms of heritage.

Adnate was selected by AGNSW's Timothy Dale, Monica Rudhar, and Alexis Wildman, with assistance from the wider Packing Room team.

Rudhar said Adnate's portrait is 'characterised by grand scale, vivid colours and a gaze that draws you in.'

'Matt's powerful portrait encapsulates Baker Boy as the inspirational Indigenous storyteller that he is, mirroring the joy and hope that his music brings to the world,' she said.

The AUD $3,000 cash prize is open to all paintings entered in Australia's oldest portrait award, the $100,000 Archibald Prize.

Adnate was also an Archibald Prize finalist in 2023 for his portrait of another musician—former Silverchair frontman Daniel Johns.

The 58 nominees for this year's Archibald include Angus McDonald's painting of professor Marcia Langton, Drew Bickford's homage to Australian video artist duo Soda Jerk, Zoe Young's sun-drenched painting of food writer Jill Dupleix, and Natasha Walsh's campy representation of fashion designers Katie-Louise Nicol-Ford and Lilian Nicol-Ford.

The winners of the Archibald Prize, the $50,000 Wynne Prize for landscape painting, and the $40,000 Sulman Prize for genre painting or mural projects will be announced on 7 June.

Works by the finalists in all three prizes will be exhibited at AGNSW from 8 June to 8 September 2024.

Last year's Packing Room Prize was won by Andrea Huelin for her portrait of comedian Cal Wilson, who died of cancer just six months later. —[O]