Sydney artist Jude Rae has won 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 52 finalists on display at the Art Gallery.
For three-time Wynne finalist Jude 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.
After receiving the news that she had won the Wynne Prize 2025, Rae said: ‘I certainly never expected to win. I grew up with the Archibald, Wynne and Sulman Prizes, with my dad entering. I’m honoured and very pleased.’
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.’
In addition to the Wynne Prize, Rae has been a finalist four times in the Archibald Prize (2014, 2019, 2021 and 2022) and was highly commended on all four occasions. She was also a finalist in the Sulman Prize 2021.
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’.
