Portrait of Hamlet actor named Packing Room Prize winner

A dark and complex portrait of Australian actor Jacob Collins in character as Hamlet by Melbourne-based artist Sean Layh has won this year’s Packing Room Prize, the much anticipated prelude to the $100,000 Archibald Portrait Prize.

Layh said it was an incidental attendance at a small boutique staging of Hamlet that prompted his in-performance portrait.

“It’s a painting of Jacob in his craft as one of Western literature’s and theatre’s most mercurial characters, Hamlet. It’s deeply satisfying to me that he said yes when I pitched the idea. This is one of the great honours of my professional life.”

First awarded in 1991 and now in its 35th year, the $3000 Packing Room Prize is democratically judged by a panel of gallery staff who receive and unpack the artwork. Entries are assessed on their visual impact and artistic merit.

Last year, Abdul Abdullah won for a portrait of fellow artist Jason Phu sitting atop a horse against the backdrop of a Central Asian steppe.

All up, 2524 entries were received for the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman prizes, the second highest recorded, eclipsed only by pandemic-delayed year of 2020 when artists were housebound.

Of 1034 entries to the Archibald, 59 works have been selected by gallery trustees as finalists with the winner to be announced next Friday. Entries must be painted in the past year and from life, with artists meeting their subjects face-to-face for at least one sitting.

Often regarded as a barometer of the nation’s mood, this year’s Archibald Prize finalists largely skirts party politics to plump for activists, fashion icons, artists, musicians and actors of stage and screen.

Apart from Caroline Zilinsky’s Zimmermann sisters, Técha Noble has brushed Anna Plunkett and Taryn Cameron-Smith captures Japanese designer Akira Isogawa.

Former Archibald Prize winners are back as painters and sitters: Morgan Stokes has painted on linen a chimeric Yvette Coppersmith, the 2018 Archibald Prize winner. Nine years after his win, Mitch Cairns is back with a distinctively abstracted portrait of novelist, essayist and poet, Gerald Murnane.

In 2020 Vincent Namatjira became the first Indigenous artist to win the Archibald Prize with a portrait of Adam Goodes. This year he has painted himself playing bowls with Mother Earth in the middle of the Australian desert.

Guido Maestri, an Australian contemporary artist who won the 2009 Archibald Prize for a portrait of Australian singer and musician Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu, is a finalist for a fractured rendering of himself with his “head in the clouds”.

Filipino-Australian artist Marikit Santiago won the Sulman Prize 2020 with a painting of her three children. She has painted Australia’s reinstated representative at the Venice Biennale, Khaled Sabsabi, with the title, Even doves have pride. Last year’s Archibald people’s choice winner Loribelle Spirovski is a finalist as both subject for Tsering Hannaford and artist painting musician Daniel Johns.

Walpiri artist Adrian Jangal Robertson is the sole artist to achieve the trifecta and is a finalist in all three prizes.

The Archibald Prize is not blind to the cross currents of the Middle East, with Julia Dover’s pink rendering of Ahmed Al Ahmed, the intervening bystander shot while trying to wrest a gun off one of the Bondi gunmen.

Mohammed Mustafa, the Perth doctor who is on a mission to build a children’s hospital in Gaza, slouches in an undersized chair for Perth’s Desiree Crossing. Michael Zavros paints Alex Ryvchin, co chief executive officer of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, paddling feet in shallow waters.

Finalists in the Archibald and the $50,000 Wynne Prize for best landscape painting and the $40,000 Sulman Prizes for best subject painting, genre painting or mural project will be exhibited at the Art Gallery of NSW from Saturday, May 9 to Sunday, August 16.

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