Twenty-nine-year-old Sydney artist Julia Gutman has won the Art Gallery of NSW's $100,000 Archibald Prize for a portrait of her friend and fellow artist Jessica Cerro (aka singer-songwriter Montaigne) that incorporates fabric from her own clothing.
Gutman is the 11th woman to win the prestigious prize in its 102-year history, following in the footsteps of Nora Heysen, who in 1938 became the first woman to win (aged 27, remaining the youngest winner), and contemporary artists Del Kathryn Barton (who won twice, in 2008 and 2013) and Yvette Coppersmith (in 2018).
Gutman's win, based on a unanimous decision by the AGNSW's Board of Trustees (who judge the prize) caps a record-breaking year in which there were more women finalists than men.
Accepting the award at a ceremony on Friday, Gutman said it was "a very insane and very unfathomable honour. I've dreamt about it since I was 12 years old".
"I was really overwhelmed to even find out that I was selected [as a finalist] let alone that I've won the prize."
Gutman's practice, which she has described as "painting with fabric", often riffs on the iconic poses of women in art history. For example, her portrait of Cerro mimics the pose featured in Egon Schiele's famous 1917 painting Seated woman with bent knees.
Gutman said: "I'm so grateful to be working at a time where young female voices are heard, and to really get to be part of a conversation that's happening inside this gallery that speaks to the conversation that's happening in this country.
"So much of my practice is devoted to revisiting and critiquing and contending with the histories housed in institutions like this one."
The base of Gutman's portrait is an oil painting, but Cerro's figure is made entirely from pieces of "found" fabric — mostly "clothes that have been donated by me and by friends and family members," she told ABC News.
"So there's also personal narratives kind of embedded into the work. My favourite little example is the blue sleeve, which is actually made from the apron I wore as an art teacher working with five-year-olds [in New York]. I think they'd be very excited to see that hanging here in the art gallery. It's very sweet to be able to embed all of those memories and references into a portrait."
The title of the portrait, Head in the sky, feet on the ground, is taken from the Talking Heads song This Must Be The Place (Naive Melody).
"I think it's a really good way to talk about Jess," Gutman told ABC. "Jess is incredibly humble and grounded and brilliant and artistic at the same time.
"[And] the first time we met we were actually talking about how much we both love Talking Heads."
Gutman met Cerro during the pandemic, at the same time as her art practice was undergoing a radical shift from painting towards textiles.
"Clothing is something that I had an abundance [of] around me during lockdown. I was working out of my bedroom … I started experimenting with my old clothes, because I'm just really sentimental and I don't throw anything away," she told ABC Arts in 2021.
She says her Archibald-winning work is a step forward in her art practice, which for the last few years has involved loose tapestries that hang.
"I'm a painter, and I really wanted [this work] to speak more directly to the history and language of painting," Gutman explains.
"So much of my work has been read as textiles, when the conceptual content is really speaking to painting, and the approach has come out of painting."
The Wynne and Sulman prizes
The Archibald is one of a trio of major prizes presented simultaneously by the Art Gallery of NSW each year, alongside the $50,000 Wynne Prize, awarded to "the best landscape painting of Australian scenery or figurative sculpture"; and the $40,000 Sulman Prize for a "genre painting, subject painting or mural project".
This year, the winners of the Wynne and Sulman prizes were artists from the Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands, consolidating a banner year for Aboriginal artists, with more finalists (38) across the three prizes than in any year previously.
First-time Wynne finalist Zaachariaha Fielding, best known as one half of duo Electric Fields, won the Wynne for his depiction of music and movement on Country in Mimili, a small community in the eastern part of the APY Lands.
His painting is titled Inma, a Pitjantjatjara word meaning "cultural song and dance", and in his artist statement he writes:
"This is a memory that I was able to document which happened in Paralpi. It's a place that's like the Sydney Opera House for the APY Lands! It's where people come to embrace and celebrate children, teaching them how to move and mimic their clan emblem, and, for Mimili, this has always been the maku (witchetty grub)."
"This is for all the people that choose joy and beauty and the song over fight," Fielding said, accepting the award.
"I am my work. I live my work. I live it in my studio in Adelaide, and I live it in my life."
He paid respects to elders, including his father, award-winning artist Robert Fielding.
"I want to thank them for the courage they gave me. I also want to thank them for their humour. It's the kind of humour that only is possible when you know who you are. They have deep cultural knowledge, but it's their ability to laugh things off because of how strong they were within themselves that I've always admired. You have to be on Country to get that humour."
A similar sense of humour is evident in this year's Sulman Prize winner, by Doris Bush Nungarrayi, which depicts several Mamus (or "cheeky ones", as she calls them) — described in a statement accompanying the painting as "ominous and malevolent spirits that terrify Aṉangu".
The painting, titled Mamunya ngalyananyi (Monster coming), was painted at Papunya Tjupi Arts, a "100 per cent Aboriginal owned and directed" community arts organisation based in Papunya, the birthplace of the Western Desert dot-painting.
Exhibitions for the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes will open on Saturday May 6 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
