Richard Lewer wins 2026 Archibald Prize for Iluwanti Ken portrait
It was sixth time lucky for Melbourne artist Richard Lewer, who won this year’s Archibald Prize for his portrait of indigenous artist Iluwanti Ken.
The painting was announced as the winner of the $100,000 prize at the Art Gallery of NSW on Friday, selected unanimously by the gallery’s board of trustees from a near-record 1034 entries and 59 finalists.
Accepting the award, Lewer said he was “deeply honored” to win and that his goal had always been to bring recognition to the work of his subject, a senior elder and artist known for his ink drawings of mother eagles.
New Zealand-born Lewer’s art encompasses painting, drawing, animation and video. He studied at the Elam School of Fine Art in Auckland and the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne before becoming a fixture on the Australian art scene.
Lewer is no stranger to the Art Gallery of NSW; In 2022 he documented the construction workers behind the Sydney Modern project, and in 2024 he re-imagined the story of Adam and Eve in 12 paintings for the National Gallery of Victoria Triennial.
Considered Australia’s most prestigious portrait award, the Archibald is awarded to the best portrait by an Australian resident of a person “of distinction in the field of art, literature, science or politics”. Submissions must be a life painting from the past year, with artists meeting their subjects face-to-face in at least one session. Lewer traveled to Central Australia for the session. The paint stains on Iluwanti Ken’s arm reflect his life as a working artist, as if he had just left the studio.
Last week, self-taught Melbourne artist Sean Layh was awarded the Packing Room Award, voted on annually by gallery staff who hang the paintings, for his performative, thought-provoking, epically staged portrait of British-Australian actor Jacob Collins. hamlet.
Other finalists for this year’s award include portraits of singer Cody Simpson, fashion designers Anna Plunkett and Nicky and Simone Zimmerman, actress Susie Porter and Australian Governor-General Sam Mostyn.
Along with Archibald, the $50,000 Wynne prize for landscape painting and figurative sculpture was awarded Friday to Gaypalani Wanambi for a major double-sided work detailing the songs of the Marakulu clan and their ancestral honey hunter Wuyal.
The $40,000 Sulman Awards for best subject painting, genre painting or mural project went to sentimental favorite Lucy Culliton for her painting of her greyhound Toolah, one of nine rescue dogs she fostered.
“This chair is Toolah’s favorite place to sleep while I’m painting in the studio. I love how it camouflages itself in the upholstery of the chair. I was doing large Monaro lawn paintings in a matching palette at the time, so I had to add one,” Culliton said in the artist statement.
This year, a near-record 2,524 applications were received for the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman awards; male and female artists accounted for an almost equal share.
A total of 42 percent of the Archibald finalists were painted by first-time nominees.
The artists who participated in the competition, five with self-portraits and 14 with portraits of another artist, again stood out as subjects. The other 13 came from stage and screen, eight were activists or advocates, six were from the music world, five were from fashion and design and three were from media and journalism.
More to come
