Packing Room Prize awarded to portrait of activist artist by an activist artist as Archibald finalists announced

Pro-Palestinian activist artist Abdul Abdullah has taken out the Art Gallery of NSW’s 2025 Packing Room Prize, a curtain-raiser to the $100,000 Archibald Prize, the country’s most celebrated portrait prize.

Rosemary Neill and Claire Harvey

Detail from Archibald Prize finalist Abdul Abdullah, No mountain high enough, a portrait of artist Jason Phu

3 min read

11:30AMMay 01, 2025.

Updated 8:51PMMay 01, 2025

A seven-time Archibald finalist, Abdullah won the $3000 Packing Room Prize, announced on Thursday, for his portrait of fellow artist Jason Phu.

Both artists are social media activists and finalists for the main Archibald Prize. Phu has called for the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale to be permanently boycotted because of the recent dumping of Lebanese-Australian artist Khaled Sabsabi from the 2026 Venice Biennale.

A three-time Archibald Prize finalist and Sulman Prize winner, Phu said on Instagram that “until he (Sabsabi) is reinstated … a boycott on the pavilion forever.”

Phu has been shortlisted for the Archibald again this year for his bold, abstract portrait of actor Hugo Weaving.

Titled No mountain high enough, Abdullah’s Packing Room Prize-winner depicts Phu on horseback in a mountain landscape with X-like bird icons fluttering about his head.

Perth-born Abdullah was not present at the awards ceremony but said via video link from Bangkok that he was “stoked” his work was chosen for the award, which is judged by gallery staff who unpack and hang the entries.

“It was a joy to paint Jason,” Abdullah said. “He’s been my best friend for so many years.”

The AGNSW’s new director, Maud Page, said Abdullah’s portrait was a “wonderful” work, describing the Archibald as “this most democratic of prizes”.

Fifty-seven shortlisted paintings chosen from 904 entries are vying for the main $100,000 prize, which will be revealed on May 9.

Abdullah, based between Melbourne and Bangkok, has Malay, Indonesian and European heritage and has described himself “as an ‘outsider amongst outsiders’, with a post 9/11 mindset’’.

Like Phu, he has backed Sabsabi on social media, reposting a funding appeal to send him and his curator, Michael Dagostino, to Venice as independent artists.

Artist Abdul Abdullah.

The pair’s appointment as Australia’s representatives to the 2026 Venice Biennale was revoked by Creative Australia after it was discovered Sabsabi’s earlier works included a portrait of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and a video work of the 9/11 twin towers terrorist attack called Thank you Very Much.

In November 2023, Abdullah supported an art auction fundraiser for Gaza and in October 2023 – along with 1000 other artists – he and his brother, artist Abdul-Rahman Abdullah, signed an open letter calling for an end to the “genocide” in Gaza. The letter, promoted by literary journal Overland and visual arts body NAVA, downplayed Hamas’s 2023 massacre of 1200 Israelis as “armed attacks on October 7 by Palestinian people’’.

Abdullah and Abdul-Rahman Abdullah are both members of the influential eleven collective of Muslim Australian artists that was initiated by Sabsabi.

Abdul-Rahman Abdullah made headlines in October when he resigned from the board of the National Gallery of Australia just one day after it emerged he had accused Israel of conducting a “holocaust” against Palestinians.

As artists who have painted other artists for this year’s Archibald Prize, Abdullah and Phu are far from alone: almost 60 per cent of the short-listed paintings are portraits of artists by other artists (22 entries) or self-portraits (12).

The 104-year-old prize was designed to be awarded to the best portrait “preferentially of some man or woman distinguished in arts, letters, science or politics”.

AGNSW senior curator of contemporary Australian art Beatrice Gralton said of artists painting artists for the Archibald: “I don’t think it’s a trend. I think there is something there about friendships.’’ Gralton said this pattern could reflect how artist-sitters might drop their guard for other artists, resulting in more revealing portraits.

The works shortlisted for this year’s Archibald feature high-profile celebrities including Hugo Weaving, Nicole and Antonia Kidman, radio star Jackie O, Indigenous composer William Barton and Neale Daniher, former AFL coach and 2025 Australian of the Year who is battling motor neurone disease.

Vincent Namatjira, who made history in 2020 as the first Indigenous artist to win the Archibald with his portrait of former AFL star Adam Goodes, is a finalist again this year.

A portrait of the teenage Boy Swallows Universe star Felix Cameron by Jeremy Eden made the finalists’ cut, as did works depicting prominent defamation lawyer Sue Chrysanthou and a self-portrait by Mambo designer and co-founder of Mental As Anything Chris O’Doherty (aka Reg Mombassa) during a period of hospitalisation.

Veteran artist Ken Done sat for painter Fiona Lowry and painter Cressida Campbell has been captured in a photorealist work by Natasha Bieniek.

To qualify for the Archibald, entries must have been painted in the past year, from at least one live sitting with the artist.

The finalists for the $50,000 Wynne landscape and sculpture prize and the $40,000 Sulman genre and mural award, were also revealed on Thursday.