A year since her Archibald Prize win, artist Julia Gutman embarks on her biggest project yet
The Archibald Prize-winner is speaking her mind ahead of her first solo institution exhibition since her history-making win.
You can now listen to The Australian's articles. Give us your feedback.
When Julia Gutman won last year’s Archibald Prize at the age of 29, she became one of the youngest ever entrants to take the title. She also happened to be a first-time finalist. A year on, Vogue sits down with the history-making artist to find out where she’ll hang her art next.
There is a Hans Christian Andersen fairytale that begins not with once upon a time, but with a shadow. One winter’s morning, as torrential rain lashes the windows of her studio in Sydney’s Woolloomooloo, the artist Julia Gutman recounts the story. A man is visited by his shadow. At first, his other self is only a pale reflection, but over time he grows in body and in spirit; he earns riches, he cultivates knowledge, he travels widely, he courts a princess. At the conclusion of the tale, the shadow has the man executed.
Gutman has been thinking about this story a lot. It’s stitched right into the work she has produced this year: Everyone You Are Looking at is Also You, her exhibition at Melbourne’s Sullivan+Strumpf gallery in March, in which a woman confronts her own reflection, and life in the third person, the installation she is creating for the Art Gallery of Western Australia (AGWA), for her first solo institution show next month.
It’s also in Echo, the animated short film that was beamed onto the Opera House during Vivid’s annual Lighting of the Sails in June. In it, two patchworked women, pieced together from recycled denim and scraps of hessian, regard each other warily. Which one is the real self and which one is the shadow?
“There’s something in the feeling of people’s perception of you becoming crystallised into something that has nothing to do with you, and everything to do with their own projections,” Gutman muses. “I think there’s a strange experience when maybe you’re not someone who sought out public recognition, and then you experience it, where other people feel entitled to the idea of you…” she trails off.
How do you make sure that this idea of you is true, at least in some way, to the real you? The artist shrugs. “You don’t have control over it.”
Gutman is sitting in her studio, having changed out of the Loewe and Prada kit from this morning’s Vogue photo shoot and into her working uniform. She is wearing toffee-coloured Lee Mathews cargo pants, a padded overshirt and chunky Ganni loafers from Depop that are, admittedly, a size too big, but Gutman has stuffed them with thick socks. Her dog, Tabby, is curled up at her feet like a shadow. “I’m a studio rat,” she says cheerfully, relaxing into the couch. “I’m always here.”
This is where Gutman forages for fabric from her “library” of textiles and pieces them into contemplative portraits, stitching by hand or on a sewing machine. For the first time, to create her ambitious AGWA installation, Gutman is passing over responsibility for the weaving process to Textiel, a fabric museum in Tilburg in the Netherlands, equipped with one of the biggest looms in the world. As a result, the work will be the largest of her practice.
It’s another in a line of firsts for Gutman: at 29, she was a first-time finalist in last year’s Archibald Prize for her portrait of the singer Montaigne, Head in the sky, feet on the ground (2023), and became one of the youngest winners in the prize’s history.
I think there’s a strange experience when maybe you’re not someone who sought out public recognition, and then you experience it, where other people feel entitled to the idea of you.
“It’s been nuts,” she says, summing up the past year. There’s a wryness to Gutman, now 31, who breezily shares the story of the night she dragged her friends out to see the Lighting of the Sails, only to have her parade quite literally rained on by a biblical storm. “The captain on the boat who took us out was like, ‘Don’t worry, it’s really shit this year,’” she says, convulsing with laughter. “There’s a joy in knowing that people are really enjoying [my work] and being able to witness that. There’s also a vulnerability in knowing the other thing is possible, too,” Gutman adds.
In the year since her Archibald win, she has grappled with how to make sense of the strange shadow of her new-found public persona. “Living in a city like Sydney, you’re always aware that there are going to be people who don’t like you,” she begins. “Having a public profile, you just become hyper aware of it, and I’ve had to let it go. I feel confident in my values. I like what I do. I really love my life, and you have to not let the shadow of you become too real. It’s a construction.”
Born in Sydney, Gutman is the youngest in a family where creativity was nurtured. “Neither of my parents worked in creative fields, but my dad studied architecture and my mum was always making art,” she remembers. “Also, when you’re the youngest, you end up in a lot of situations where you shouldn’t be. And the way that was dealt with, for me, there were always pencils and paper.”
She was innately artistic, yes, but Gutman has spent time as a teacher and believes “most kids seem like artists”. “I don’t think that’s a unique sensibility,” she continues. “I think it’s just a privilege to not be told you have to stop doing that, and to be continually encouraged to tap into that and maintain that confidence, and I was definitely privileged in that way.”
She studied at UNSW Art & Design before completing her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design. Her first exhibition in 2020, as part of the NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace, speed-ramped her career: she was a 2021 Ramsay Art Prize finalist, was chosen for the MCA’s 2022 Primavera showcase and exhibited at Sydney Contemporary in 2023.
Joanna Strumpf, co-founder of Sullivan+Strumpf, saw Gutman’s work for the first time in 2020 and approached her for representation.
“I spent the whole night staring at her work,” Strumpf admits, “intrigued by the painterly nature of her textiles, her nods to art history and the elegance of her palette.”
Gutman’s earliest pieces were reflections of her close circle: No one Told Me the Shadows Could Be So Bright (2020) features a crowd of her female friends cloaked in casual intimacy. These works were about identity as a collective – a living, breathing tapestry – subtext made text as Gutman fashioned them from clothing donated by her friends.
For her next show, she reversed course: “Every interaction we have with another is a projection of our own psyche.” The shift in focus was precipitated by heightened caution. “I’ve been more hesitant to include my friends,” she admits, though points to Olive (2023), her entry into this year’s Wynne Prize, as an exception. “There’s definitely ethical lines around how much you wanna give away in public about people, which I didn’t have to think about three years ago.”
When you’re the youngest, you end up in a lot of situations where you shouldn’t be.
The figures you now see in Gutman’s work – assessing, questioning, trying to figure themselves out – are all, in the broadest strokes, Gutman herself. A shadow slowly growing form. “If I use myself, I’m not talking about Julia, I’m talking about ‘the self’,” she explains. “It’s not about me.”
Gutman is animated. She makes for her workshop table – Tabby padding along beside her – upon which rest two larger-than-life patchworked nudes. These are the figures who will anchor the AGWA installation, standing back to back but not quite touching, as water pools around them. Gutman brings up a render on her iPhone and that has an immediately different air to her recent work; there is a balance in the composition, a rotated allusion to Caravaggio’s Narcissus that is arresting in its stillness. Then there’s the sheer scope of it, both physically – dominating the space of the gallery – and thematically.
“It will have a new complexity, a depth and a textural form that will see her make real and lyrically felt the themes of fragility, connection and expressivity that drive her output,” affirms AGWA director Colin Walker.
At present, Gutman is wrestling with the nakedness of the figures; she doesn’t want people to perceive them as sexual objects. “It’s pissing me off that that’s the way the work has to be read. I don’t care that it’s me – it’s not relevant. It’s me because I’m in the studio. It’s not like, please look at my body,” she laughs. “But people are stupid.”
The nakedness has a timeless, mythical quality, taking the figures out of context to force self-reflection. Maybe she’ll cover them with fabric, which will draw attention to the materiality of them. That all of these things are pieced together from the same stuff: a shimmering metallic scrap of one of Gutman’s old university formal dresses, a blush pink ballet tutu that belonged to a friend, a fuzzy jumper, her grandmother’s treasured scarf, “lots of bras”. Stitched together in shades of brown and ochre until “you can’t see where one fabric ends and another begins”, the figures have interiority far beyond the two-dimensional.
Nothing is set in stone until Gutman travels to Tilburg, where she will trial a number of different yarns and techniques until she lands on something that replicates the organic nature of her previous works. “The double-edge sword of a big project is you have all this support; when you have all this support, you can’t be as free,” Gutman muses.
She believes artists need big projects because it encourages them to be ambitious, but they should also seek out smaller projects where everything is play. “I wanna do some small projects next,” she smiles. Success has a way of dampening ambition, but this isn’t that; Gutman has already planned out her 2025 – she just can’t talk about it yet. Think of it as a recalibration. If she has learned anything in the past year, it’s that – “thankfully”, she sighs – the shadow self doesn’t really matter at all. “I care deeply about the work and I think most of it is stupid outside of that,” she concludes. “I’m very grateful to have the opportunity to make it. I’m very ambitious with my work, I want it to be more challenging and more exciting. And I love doing it.”
Life in the third person is on display at the Art Gallery of Western Australia from October 5.
This article appears in the September issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
More Coverage
