Archibald & Wynne Prizes 2023.: Art Gallery of NSW

The subject of Danie Mellor’s Archibald painting is Dr Gene Sherman AM, a philanthropist, art collector and academic who ran Sherman Galleries for 21 years. She is also renowned for her passion for design and fashion.

‘This work explores Gene’s relationship with aesthetics and her emotional journey following the passing of her husband Brian Sherman AM in 2022,’ says Mellor.

‘To communicate Gene’s avant-garde sensibility in her portrait, l chose Alesso Baldovinetti’s 1465 Portrait of a lady in yellow as the basis for the composition. It also provides a reference to Renaissance engagement with culture and openness to ideas, and a way of showing her life-long contribution to the arts.

‘Gene is painted in profile, echoing the pose of Baldovinetti’s sitter, enigmatically reflecting on the passage of life. The faint presence of the lady together with Gene symbolises the continuing, intergenerational nature of culture and history, and tradition of portraiture.

‘I called it A portrait of intimacy as it felt like a reflective, introspective piece, especially given its muted palette and heightened sense that we are glimpsing Gene’s inner self.’

In this self-portrait, Natasha Walsh celebrates the inner workings of the artist’s studio, while also subverting the historically limiting place of women within this space.

‘Referencing Brett Whiteley’s 1976 Archibald-winning work Self-portrait in the studio, I have repositioned the nude from the bottom left-hand corner, where she lay inert, to hold the active position of an artist painting her own nude representation through mirrors. The viewer adopts her perspective as the artist and subject, her outstretched hands becoming our own as she paints her work, The gaze,’ says Walsh.  

The portrait also references the work of Japanese artist Hokusai along with the artists he inspired – Vincent van Gogh and Henri Matisse – who, in turn, inspired Whiteley and Walsh herself. It is painted on copper, and the variations in colour are determined by the reactions of different pigments to the oxidisation process. 

Walsh won the 2018 Brett Whiteley Travelling Art Scholarship at the age of 24. This is her fifth time in the Archibald Prize.

Depicted here is Wiinggina/Lake Eacham, a volcanic crater lake and a site of Yamani, the rainbow serpent, found in the Atherton Tablelands. This is Ngadjon-jii, Danie Mellor’s Country, and was created following fieldtrips and visits to the Tablelands, made over several years. It is a place which is ‘profoundly beautiful’, says Mellor. ‘The gentle, mineral- coloured azure waters contrast with verdant greens and rich, primordial forms and vegetation of towering fig trees and lush rainforest.’

Such a landscape is evident in Shadow land (water talking story place); however Mellor’s purposeful sepia toning of the work has been used to locate this scene in a period of history documented by early photographic techniques. Mellor’s inclusion of bama (people), who return our gaze while drifting in a canoe near the lake’s shoreline, reflects on the complex histories of colonised landscapes from Mellor’s Country, and the ethnographic ‘othering’ of Indigenous peoples.

This is the second year in a row that Mellor has been selected as a Wynne finalist.

In Imagine if they'd cared, Joan Ross wonders ‘what Australia would be like if the British colonisers had a caring attitude to both the original occupants and the plants and animals.’ Ross paints a couple in 18th century dress nursing a giant drooping flower – an absurd posture of loving care, incongruous with what she sees as the negligence of white settlers.

The couple are superimposed over an image of Weatherboard Falls (1863) by Eugene Von Guerard, who is celebrated for his pristine Australian landscapes painted in the tradition of the European sublime. Today known as Wentworth Falls, in the Blue Mountains, the site is in an area Ross called home for over 30 years. Her digitally manipulated and hand painted remake of Von Guerard’s work dyes the waterfall fluoro yellow – a signature colour that Ross uses as a metaphor for colonisation, playing with the power of ‘high vis’ yellow, as dangerous and alien to the landscape. The scent of colonisation is still strong, Ross says: ‘Possession is a perfume of greed.’