You would have to be a misanthrope not to appreciate this year’s Archibald Prize-winning portrait by Sydney artist Mitch Cairns. An intimate, stylised portrait of his artist-partner Agatha Gothe-Snape, seated on a rug in an “uncomfortably comfortable” position amid the chaos of their lives as a young family, Agatha Gothe-Snape has been named the winner of the $100,000 Archibald Prize for 2017.
“I composed this portrait with love. Agatha and I share everything in our lives; our two-year-old son; our work as artists and our day-to-day lives ... It’s a domestic scene. When you have a young child there’s a lot of creative play happening on the floor. Artists need a lot of support and I do have that in spades. I would like to thank Agatha, my beautiful partner, I love you very much,” Cairns told media and guests today, including a proud and teary Goethe-Snape, a highly regarded contemporary artist in her own right.
This is the fourth time Cairns’s work has been hung in the Art Gallery of NSW’s annual competition. His 2014 and ’15 portraits of Reg Richardson and artist Peter Powditch were judged highly commended but this year’s portrait, which pays homage to modernist painters such as Matisse and Leger, ultimately secured the judges’ unanimous vote.
“After three weeks of hard work our board of trustees have punched each other, we have cajoled each other but we remain totally unified,” joked AGNSW board president David Gonski. “It was the skill and sensitivity of Mitch’s portrait which left a significant impression on us all,” he added, before naming the runner-up and highly commended painting by Jun Chen of his former dealer and gallerist Ray Hughes.
A particularly popular choice was the winner of the $50,000 Wynne Prize for landscape, Betty Kuntiwa Pumani’s painting of her mother’s country Antara in South Australia’s Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara lands. So strong was the representation of finalists from APY lands this year – 11 in total – they were hung together in the central gallery, normally reserved for Archibald portraits. The Ken family, also APY lands artists, won the 2016 Wynne prize.
“When I paint my country I am celebrating the culture of my country, and am taking my turn passing on these lessons, passing on the Tjukurpa (cultural story) to the next generation. This is how we keep our culture strong,” Pumani says in her native Pitjantjatjara. “The calibre of paintings in this room is strong because our culture is strong, our land is strong, our families are strong.”
The $40,000 Sulman prize for best genre painting, subject painting or mural project is the only prize of the three to be judged by an artist. This year, artist and 2017 Archibald finalist Tony Albert selected Joan Ross’s Oh history, you lied to me, a mixed media work that confronts Australia’s uneasy relationship with its colonial past. “I’m really grateful Tony has chosen a work like this because I think we need to continue talking about the ongoing effects of colonisation in Australia and all the issues that it brings up,” Ross says.
The 2017 Archibald Prize is on display at the Art Gallery NSW until October 22, when it will tour regionally.
