The artist as creator of all things: Julie Fragar wins the Archibald for a portrait among the stars

By Joanna Mendelssohn, Honorary Senior Fellow, School of Culture and Communication. Editor in Chief, Design and Art of Australia Online, The University of Melbourne

Beatrice Gralton, who curated this year’s Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes, has hung the exhibition well. Julie Fragar’s Archibald-winning portrait of her friend and fellow artist Justene Williams is impossible to miss in the central court of the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Fragar’s subject bursts out of the central space, as though she is herself the Big Bang that created the Universe. This is the artist as the Creator of All Things, the governor of a world that extends from her hands. Behind her are the stars from whence she may have come.

Her face is grave, but…

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