Artist Julie Fragar wins Archibald Prize with portrait of best friend

Julie Fragar and Justene Williams have been best friends for 20 years, since their days at the Sydney College of the Arts.

Fragar was a kid from country NSW. Williams’ father owned a car-wrecking yard in Bankstown, and she used to play with her sister among the car bodies.

2025 Archibald Prize winner Julie Fragar, right, and her subject Justene Williams at the Art Gallery of NSW on Friday. Credit: Sitthixay Ditthavong

“I’d sit in a car wreck and imagine taking off and going to other places,” Williams recounts. “But there’s also the idea that has never left me of obsolescence, where you never throw anything out.”

Williams credits that off-beat childhood playground as inspiration for an eclectic catalogue of sculpture, photography and performance pieces that are backdrops to this year’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait.

Fragar shows Williams as a master conjuror in Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene), selected from 57 finalists for Australia’s leading award for portraiture.

Fragar cried happy tears on being told by Art Gallery of NSW director Maud Page of her win, which succeeds in capturing her friend’s “singularity and other worldiness that those who know Justene understand”.

Julie Fragar’s Flagship Mother Multiverse (Justene) is the Archibald Prize 2025 winner.

“When you plan to spend three months with someone’s image in your studio, you make sure you like them,” Fragar said, listing the reasons she chose Williams as her subject.

“The second reason is because as an artist she is extraordinary. Justene burst out of the gates from art school in the 1990s around the same time.

“Justene quickly became one of the central figures in the Sydney art scene for her hectic photographs, videos and performances and later on installations and sculptures and even operas.

“So I made this painting because I wanted to honour the incredible multiverse of artwork that seems to be exploding from her, spinning, not quite out of control.”

The announcement came a week after another set of best friends took out the Packing Room Prize, Abdul Abdullah painting Jason Phu for No mountain high enough.

This year’s $50,000 Wynne Prize winner was Sydney artist Jude Rae for Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal, depicting an immense sky underlaid with the impending sunrise.

Packing Room Prize winner: Abdul Abdullah’s No Mountain High Enough is a portrait of Jason Phu.Credit: Art Gallery of New South Wales / Jenni Carter

Rae painted the view from her bathroom window on the fifth floor of her Redfern apartment block.

“There is something compelling about the constantly flashing gantry lights and the floodlights blasting away in the hours before dawn,” she said.

Jude Rae’s Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal, oil on linen, 200cm x 150.4cm

Blue Mountains artist Gene A’Hern won the $40,000 Sulman Prize for Sky painting, a vibrant and gestural work that unfolded as he was skywatching and reflecting on the choreography of nature – of birds singing in harmony, branches sighing in the wind, the closing curtain of the setting sun.

Gene A’Hern’s Sky painting, oil and oil stick on board, 240cm x 240cm

Fragar is only the 14th female artist to take the Archibald Prize, now in its 102nd year. Artist and sitter are colleagues at the Queensland College of Art and Design, where Fragar is the head of painting and Williams is the head of sculpture.

Her winning portrait was sketched in one sitting, then pieced together as a composite over three months with the help of photographs in her Brisbane studio. Williams’ daughter, Honore, appears as a tiny figure balancing atop a sculptured commission for Sydney Modern.

Looking back on her younger self, Fragar said, her win seemed unimaginable.

“My first goal as an artist was to be included in Art Express [exhibition] and I remember walking through the art gallery and saying, ‘Oh goodness, imagine if I could be at the entrance’,” she said.

On the $100,000 prizemoney, Fragar said she intended to “sit there and look at it in disbelief and then buy an easel I haven’t made myself”.

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