Archibald Prize 2025: When works of quality like this fail to make the cut, we have a problem

The Archibald Prize hang is an annual dog’s breakfast. The judges need to do better.

Johannes Leak with his Archibald entry painting of Alex Ryvchin. Picture: Ryan Osland

You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.

You can now listen to The Australian's articles.

Getting into the Archibald often feels like a lottery, especially when artists see their work inexplicably excluded or fortuitously accepted. But of course it’s a rigged lottery. For one thing, you don’t make a dog’s breakfast of an exhibition – which is the whole point of the contemporary Archibald – without deliberately choosing disparate and dissonant works. Where the element of luck comes in is whether you get to be one of the token good pictures or one of the glossy celebrity portraits, or one of the outsider daubs which the punters are supposed to ridicule, just as people once laughed at court dwarves.

And the rigging extends of course to the choice of favourite artists, ones who are fashionable or associated with networks of patronage and commercial galleries that have special relations with the Art Gallery of NSW; and to celebrity subjects, including pop celebrities and socio-political agitators for causes like Indigenous rights or women’s issues and so on.

All of this helps explain what might otherwise seem the very strange decision to exclude Johannes Leak’s portrait of Alex Ryvchin from this year’s Archibald. The painting is a bit bigger than necessary, but still an acceptable size. I have only seen it in reproduction, but it appears to be an excellent likeness and a perceptive and sensitive portrait of its subject. It would undoubtedly have taken its place among the 10 or so best pictures in this year’s exhibition and easily eclipses most of those actually selected.

‘The Archibald trades on the cliché of “controversy” but as usual, the Gallery has no stomach for real controversy; like the artworld in general.’

But alas, Johannes Leak is not a favourite artist of the establishment, nor are his subjects acceptable to them. A few years ago his portrait of Jacinta Price was rejected from the Archibald because, although Aboriginal and a woman, she was the wrong kind of Aboriginal woman – the kind who rocked the boat and questioned the status quo of ingrained and inveterate dysfunction in Indigenous communities.

There is little doubt that the portrait of Alex Ryvchin, a Jewish community leader, was similarly excluded either because of actual anti-Semitism or the fear of anti-Semitic reaction to the hanging of the picture. The Archibald trades on the cliché of “controversy” but as usual, the Gallery has no stomach for real controversy; like the artworld in general, it loves the kitsch idea of art as provocative and dangerous, but adheres in practice to a position of timidity, risk-aversion and moral conformity.

In pictures: The Archibald Finalists 2025

VIEW GALLERY