The Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of New South Wales has closed its doors for another year and embarked on its regional tour, yet a silence followed the ceremony. For a portrait prize that claims to prefer figures “distinguished in art, science, letters or politics”, almost no one has asked what this year’s glossy, sentimental prize‑winners’ artworks are actually doing — or avoiding doing.

The $100,000 first prize went to New Zealand–born artist Richard Lewer for his portrait of Iluwanti Ken, a Pitjantjatjara Elder, senior artist, and ngangkaṟi (traditional healer). Lewer’s life‑size painting is a square, ochre‑orange canvas juxtaposed with Ken’s patterned clothing and organic form, creating a visual arrangement that performs harmony rather than interrogating it.

At first glance, the artwork might seem to hold merit, the act of a friend painting a friend. It also fills an institutional gap: Aboriginal Australia and settler Australia appear here to be co‑existing on equal terms, which has long be an issue for the Prize. For most of the twentieth century, Aboriginal sitters were almost entirely absent; Albert Namatjira’s 1956 portrait — painted by William Dargie — stood alone in a field dominated by white artists depicting white subjects.

When looking at the portrait, however, it’s impossible not to think of American painter Amy Sherald, who became internationally recognised after her portrait of Michelle Obama in 2018. Sherald paints life‑size Black Americans using minimalised, predominantly single‑colour backgrounds “to heighten the humanity of the sitter”, often juxtaposed with patterned clothing. Works such as All Things Bright and Beautiful (2016) and She had an inside and an outside now, and suddenly she knew how not to mix them (2018) feature golden or burnt‑orange grounds. She uses grisaille — greyscale skin tones — as a deliberate racial strategy: it interrupts the viewer’s habitual reading of Black skin, forcing attention onto the subject’s presence rather than the politics of colour.

Lewer’s portrait, while not employing grisaille, sits uncomfortably close to Sherald’s project in its formal vocabulary: the flat ochre ground, the patterned clothing, the frontal stillness, the iconic composure. Sherald does not own this aesthetic, but she is a highly recognised international artist. If you know her work, it is virtually impossible not to bring that into the reading of Lewer’s painting, and to regard Lewer’s portrait and Sherald’s work as entering an implicit dialogue.

Sherald has stated that her project is to create “playful yet sober portraits of Black Americans within an imaginative history where I do Black my way”. Her work restores Blackness to Western art history with dignity and intention. As she told Time:

It was just about looking. Looking back at our history and painting the things that I didn’t see … art history tells me that I’m elevating my people, but I’m not. That’s just the story that’s projected onto my storytelling. They’re already there.

Sherald’s visual strategies are interventions developed in response to the historical conditions of Black representation. Grisaille interrupts the viewer’s habitual reading of Black skin, as the flat, saturated backgrounds create a space where Black presence is centred rather than marginalised. The often glamorous people staring straight at the viewer are there — they were always there — not depicted as suffering, as Sherald notes they mostly were in past representations. These choices arise from Sherald’s lived experience as a Black American woman and from her stated project to restore Blackness to Western portraiture with dignity.

This is why Lewer’s proximity to Sherald matters. When a non‑Black artist adopts a visual language developed by a Black American painter for explicitly racialised purposes — flat ochre ground, patterned clothing, frontal stillness, iconic composure — the politics of that proximity needs to be interrogated. Sherald’s visual strategies were developed in response to the conditions of Black representation. When similar strategies are adopted by white artists, the issue is not only imitation but the unexamined transfer of racialised imagery — a dynamic that, when deployed without political clarity, may be open to criticisms of being cynically redundant. What the work is doing necessarily shifts because Lewer’s racial background alters the conditions under which these visual strategies operate: the historical conditions to which Sherald’s work responds are no longer present, and that shift requires consideration rather than being treated as a purely aesthetic choice.

Australian contemporary art has a long history of unexamined debts to international artists, often protected by geographic isolation. Art students frequently emulate their overseas counterparts in the process of finding their own voice, but professional artists — especially those working with racialised subjects — should interrogate the politics of visual proximity or avoid presenting their artwork for comparison to another’s on the basis of similarity. Richard Lewer paints very well; the question is why he would open his work to such obvious and avoidable criticisms. He could have painted Ken in all manner of ways.

The Archibald’s PR often highlights the friendships between sitter and painter. Lewer also says his work is autobiographical and has spoken of his long‑standing friendship with Ken (the pair have also exhibited together). This sentimental reading aligns with the Archibald’s crowd‑friendly framing, and is a far cry from Sherald, whose works can be read as interventions in Western art history. A conclusion might be that if Lewer creates work that sits too close to Sherald’s, he may be confusing his signifiers — borrowing an anti-racist interventionist strategy to employ it as an aesthetic device.

Ken’s participation complicates this argument rather than resolving it, since she is not a passive subject upon whom Lewer has imposed an image. She is a senior artist herself, and her decision to sit for the portrait is part of the work’s constructed and publicised “meaning”. When Lewer’s visual proximity to Sherald is paired with the Archibald’s sentimental framing of their friendship, the result is a visual and institutional erasure of political asymmetry. The question, therefore, is not whether Lewer has silenced Ken in the literal sense, but whether the institutional framing of their friendship and collaboration produces a particular kind of reconciliation narrative — one in which the political asymmetries between Aboriginal and settler Australia become aesthetically smoothed over.

The Archibald’s presentation turns an artistic relationship into an institutional narrative of friendship and reconciliation, while the formal language of the portrait draws on a racialised visual vocabulary whose politics are largely left unexamined.

The silence around criticism of this portrait has been striking. The conservative art critic John McDonald has briefly noted that Lewer’s painting’s resemblance to Sherald’s sits “too close for comfort”. In the same article, McDonald praises Michael Zavros’ “bravura” for daring to paint Alex Ryvchin, co‑CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, as “the local artworld is full of anti‑Zionists posting hate speech on social media”. The reference here is to Alex with his Tefillin in the Sea, winner of the People’s Choice category in this year’s Archibald Prize.  

I learned about Zavros’s win in a Sydney Morning Herald article titled “Emotional portrait of strength and sorrow gets people’s vote in Archibald Prize”. Yet “strength and sorrow” is only one possible reading of the work, which was created in response to the 2025 massacre of Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach. A different one may be suggested by the fact that Alex Ryvchin is a prominent public defender of Israel’s military actions in Gaza — actions that have resulted in the destruction of the Strip, the killing of over 70,000 people and mass displacement of the survivors, and charges of genocide and other human rights abuses.

Here, too, a friendship was PR’d into grotesqueness: the Sydney Morning Herald article shows the two men in matching white tees and grey suit jackets, a saccharine veneer laid over the ongoing destruction of an entire population’s ability to live.

The problem is not sentiment itself. Friendship, grief, admiration and collaboration can all be meaningful and real. I think of how illuminating and moving American artist Nan Goldin’s portraits of her friends are — intimate portraits that grow from relationships, not observation. The problem is what happens when an institution makes those emotions the primary interpretive frame for works whose subjects carry histories that said institution would rather make emotionally comfortable than politically difficult.

According to Zavros, Australia is not racist, a comment that is hard to countenance in the wake of the 2023 Voice Referendum. The 2024 Australian Reconciliation Barometer reports that in 54 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples experience direct racial discrimination. According to the Scanlon Foundation, one in three Australians holds negative or hostile views about Muslims. Australia has a racism problem. It is art’s job to critique that fact, not amplify it. Otherwise, the work literally functions as propaganda.

Neutralising unproblematised art that sits too close to racialised imagery and to figures who actively promote genocide is unacceptable for an institution as prominent as the Art Gallery of New South Wales. One of the Gallery’s stated commitments is to educate the public about art, not to smooth over arrogant violence or reward artists whose work participates in political denial or is conceptually unresolved. We need an Art Gallery dedicated to anti‑racism.