The winner of this year’s $5000 Archibald People’s Choice Award is seven-time finalist Michael Zavros with his portrait of Jewish community leader Alex Ryvchin.

Ryvchin, co-CEO of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, rose to prominence in the aftermath of the December 2025 Bondi Beach terror attacks.

Zavros’ portrait, Alex with his tefillin in the sea, depicts Ryvchin walking barefoot in the shallows of a harbour beach. Wrapped around his arm is his tefillin, a small leather box containing verses from the Torah.

Zavros made reference photos with Ryvchin just weeks after the Bondi massacre in which 16 people died, including one attacker. In an emotional acceptance speech at the Art Gallery of NSW, Zavros said he was humbled his work had received the most votes of the nearly 46,000 visitors who cast a ballot at this year’s exhibition.

“I’m deeply grateful for that this portrait has connected with so many people,” he said. “Overwhelmingly, I don’t believe Australians are racist. I don’t believe we are homophobic. And I don’t believe we are antisemitic. Those things have no place in the country we aspire to be.

“It’s worth reminding ourselves how fortunate we are to live in this great Western liberal democracy that welcomed my family from Cyprus in the 1950s, and welcomed Alex who arrived from the Ukraine as a four-year-old refugee in the 1980s. What unites us is so much more powerful than what divides us.”

Zavros’ connection with Ryvchin goes back years to when he first became aware of the uncanny physical resemblance between the two. He followed Ryvchin’s career from afar and then, after Bondi, decided he wanted to him to be the subject of his 2026 Archibald entry.

“I had this serendipitous connection with Alex because we look alike,” he said. “And to that end, I just started to connect with him and watch him over the years. And then, following Bondi, he led the country in a way that I think our leaders failed to do. And I thought I really want to honour him somehow. I want to capture everything that I admire about him, all of his strength and dignity and all of the pain that he so beautifully articulates.”

Zavros believes his work resonated with visitors because of the deeply emotional subject matter.

“I think people are just really moved by it,” he said. “I painted something I believed in. I found common ground with this man. I was moved by something and I painted it. And sometimes I think that’s the best thing you can do as an artist, is paint the thing you can’t explain.”

Announcing the award, gallery director Maud Page called Zavros the nation’s “foremost realist painter”.

“His immaculate brushstrokes are perfection,” she said. “He works with assuredness, able to not only render a subject in his total likeness but also position him within an evocative narrative setting where the very ripples of water on the sand convey as much as the twist of Alex’s body.”