Congratulations to Sydney artist Jude Rae, winner of the Wynne Prize 2025 and $50,000 for her painting Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal, depicting an immense sky underlaid with the rust reds of impending sunrise.
Rae’s painting was selected from 758 entries for the Wynne Prize in 2025 and is one of fifty-two finalists on display at the Art Gallery.
Wynne Prize 2025 winner Jude Rae with her work ‘Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal’ at the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2025 winners announcement, Art Gallery of New South Wales. Artwork © the artist. Photograph: © Art Gallery of New South Wales, Diana Panuccio
For Rae, this view towards Sydney’s Botany Bay, or Kamay, is laden with its history as the birthplace of colonial Australia. Her sightline from the inner Sydney suburb of Redfern to the site of Captain Cook’s first landing in Australia was also a traditional corridor used by Aboriginal people to access the bay.
Winner Wynne Prize 2025: Jude Rae, Pre-dawn sky over Port Botany container terminal, oil on linen, 200 x 150.4cm. © the artist
Speaking of the work, Rae said: “There is something compelling about the constantly flashing gantry lights and the floodlights blasting away in those hours just before dawn. I am up at various times and love to watch the pre-dawn light, when the sky is just starting to change colour. From my bathroom window on the fifth floor of my building, I have a clear view of that scene. There is no way to photograph it – it’s too subtle and too fleeting. It’s a big sky and we’re all really little.”
The Wynne Prize is Australia’s oldest art prize and is awarded annually for the best landscape painting of Australian scenery in oils or watercolours or for the best example of figure sculpture by Australian artists.
All finalists in Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes 2025 are on view at the Art Gallery of NSW from 10 May to 17 August 2025.
artgallery.nsw.gov.au/whats-on/exhibitions/archibald-wynne-and-sulman-prizes-2025
