Julie Fragar (born 5 March 1977) is an Australian painter and educator. She is the recipient of several awards in Australia, including the 2025 Archibald Prize for portraiture, and the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize Lipman Karas People's Choice Award. Her work has been acquired by major collections, such as the Art Gallery of New South Wales and Queensland Art Gallery.
Fragar was born in Gosford, NSW, in 1977.[1] She grew up in Wee Waa and attended and graduated from Wee Waa High School.[2]
Work
Fragar has been exhibiting her paintings since the 1990s. Her art and research explores the relationships between painterly and personal languages, both biographical and autobiographical. Her paintings are composed as dense agglomerations of fragmented images, “not layers but many images knitted together in one go”.[3] Fragar's earlier paintings drew on her own life and environment as subject matter, combining these with an interest in, and explicit reference to, Gustave Courbet'srealism.[4]
Her 2016 painting Goose Chase: All of Us Together Here and Nowhere, Kilgour Prize 2016 finalist[8] and winner of the 2017 Ramsay Art Prize, Lipman Karas People's Choice Award. The piece explores the story of Antonio de Fraga, her first paternal ancestor to emigrate to Australia in the 19th century.[9]
Another painting in the same series, Antonio Departs Flores on the Whaling Tide, won the Tidal: City of Devonport National Art Award 2016.[10]
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