Guy Maestri Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu wins Archibald Prize

ARTIST Guy Maestri has taken out the prestigious Archibald Prize with his portrait of blind Aboriginal singer Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunipingu.

The shadowy portrait of the ARIA award winning singer was the bookies' early favourite to take out the $50,000 prize.

The close-up of Yunipingu's face was selected from 708 Archibald Prize entries, which were narrowed to a field of 39 finalists before being whittled down to a shortlist of five works.

In accepting his prize, Maestri thanked his family and his father, whom he said was an enormous influence in his life.

"I had eight years of rejection before I got hung," he told those assembled at the Art Gallery of NSW on Friday.

The $25,000 Wynne Prize for landscape painting or figure sculpture went to Lionel Bawden, for his work titled The Amorphous Ones (The vast colony of our being), while Ivan Durrant took out the $20,000 Sulman Prize for subject/genre painting or mural work.