The winner of the $100,000 prize will be announced next Friday, June 7, along with the winners of the Wynne and Sulman prizes.
Other finalists in this year’s competition include Brisbane-based artist Eliza Bertwistle, who has painted student and sexual consent activist Chanel Contos, and Brisbane-born and Melbourne-based, Burmese/Butchella woman Mia Boe who chose Indigenous ABC TV presenter and former AFL player Tony Armstrong to paint.
Sean Gladwell’s portrait of Julian Assange, painted from a sketch he did in the United Kingdom’s Belmarsh prison was one of the most inventive attempts at a live sitting, said Archibald curator Wayne Tunnicliffe.
“He couldn’t take art equipment in with him to prison, but he took £25 in with him to spend at the prison canteen and bought chocolate and sketched him in chocolate on his leftover £5 notes using his fingernail as brush,” Tunnicliffe said.
Matildas forward Cortnee Vine, hero to the nation when she scored the winning penalty kick in a 7-6 shootout win over France in the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup quarter-finals, has been captured in On the Bench and on the Cusp, by NSW Central Coast painter Tim Owers.
Actor Anthony LaPaglia, currently playing the lead in Death of a Salesman in Sydney, has been rendered by Woolloomooloo-based realist painter Craig Handley. Singer Missy Higgins has been painted by her sister, Nicola, and Tsering Hannaford has created Meditation on Seeing (Portrait of Dad), a portrait of her painter father, 27-times finalist Robert Hannaford.
Chinese-born Australian television news anchor who was detained in China for three years, Cheng Lei has posed for Cheng-Lei - After China by Sydney artist Kirsty Neilson.
Melbourne-based couple, academic and former hostage in Iran Kylie Moore-Gilbert and her partner comedian Sami Shah, now have a child and a portrait together, painted by Melbourne artist Ben Howe which has made the finalists’ cut.
Arrernte and Kalkadoon artist Thea Anamara Perkins, a 2020 Archibald finalist with her painting Poppy Chicka, of her grandfather Charles, is a finalist again this time with a diptych of her mother, curator Hetti.
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Nick Stathopoulos has tenderly wrought The Last Picture Show – Portrait of David Stratton, and Good Food columnist Jill Dupleix appears in Jill’s at Bills’ by Zoe Young, honouring late chef Bill Granger.
Indigenous academic Marcia Langton has been painted by Lennox Head artist and 2020 people’s choice winner Angus McDonald, who is a subject himself in a portrait by second-time finalist former refugee Mostafa Azimitabar.
Other familiar faces who appear as finalists include soccer player Craig Foster, blue Wiggle Anthony Field and actor Jacob Elordi, as well as three members of the Heartbreak High cast (actors Chloe Hayden, Will McDonald and Josh Heuston).
The exhibition opens on June 7.