Rebecca Davis 

Rebecca Davis is a Brisbane-based, South Australian-born artist who won the 2024 Adelaide Fringe poster competition. Responding to the theme of Arts Unlimited, her entry ‘All In’ filled with fantastical, quirky and diverse characters won the hearts of the judges and Rebecca top honours in this prestigious global art competition. 
 

Rebecca's self portrait is the 2025 Brisbane Portrait Prize winner of the Sylvia Jones Prize for Women Artists.  

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2025 Brisbane Portrait Prize Judge's Note

The raw honesty of Rebecca Davis’s self-portrait Seeing things differently compelled repeated viewing. As a painting it is technically excellent and aesthetically refined, but it is the absorbing image of the artist depicting herself so openly, and sharing with us her profound vulnerability, that gives this small painting its powerful emotional intensity. 

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The direct gaze of the artist – at us, at herself – anchors a sophisticated composition. Davis states that she is wearing a favourite t-shirt, and her painting of a pink-sequined, contorted mouth with teeth biting a lower lip (in agony or ecstasy?) is deft and darkly humorous. Despite its uncompromising scrutiny of the self, this affecting work is utterly unselfconscious, which makes looking at it both rewarding and confronting.

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Jason Smith, Director, Art Gallery of South Australia
Chief Judge, 2025