Duncan Pepe Long wins $30k Adam Portraiture Award
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
The prestigious $30,000 Adam Portraiture Award has been won by Duncan Pepe Long, an Auckland-based teacher, painter and printmaker, who entered the contest with a work featuring his friend of more than two decades.
Pepe Long’s win was announced at a ceremony at the New Zealand Portrait Gallery Te Pūkenga Whakaata in Wellington, on Wednesday evening.
This year represents the sixth time Pepe Long has entered the award. Each time he has been named a finalist, but this year is the first time he’s won.
The biennial painted portrait competition is Aotearoa’s most significant and popular portraiture prize, and has been held since the year 2000. The award is blind judged, and sponsored by the Adam Foundation.
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The oil-on-wood portrait shows Pepe Long’s friend Solomon Tāmehana ‒ a tattooist, musician, painter, carver and multidisciplinary artist ‒ in their Electric Ceremony tattoo studio that they founded in Auckland, surrounded by objects that Tāmehana made.
“They’re quite a character ‒ I guess that’s why I chose them,” Pepe Long said in an interview with The Post after his win.
The teacher of architectural representation and life drawing at Unitec was given the news right before teaching a class this week.
Solomon Tāmehana was chosen as the winner from 429 entries by international judge Jude Rae, an Australian artist who’s exhibited since the 1980s.
Pepe Long and Tāmehana have known each other for more than 20 years, and speak at least once a week.
They create music together, with Pepe Long playing the guitar and Tāmehana the synthesisers and drum machines. “They’re such an inspiring person in my life. … I knew that I wanted to paint them,” Pepe Long said.
Pepe Long is a self-taught artist who grew up in Auckland.
While always painting at school, he says he had no technical knowledge and instead started pouring his energy into music, before returning to painting in his early 30s.
He has been a teacher for about six years, having been mentored by artist John Pusateri.
To create his winning work, Pepe Long went into Tāmehana’s studio to make drawings, before settling on the particular expression he wanted to paint.
From there, as the appearance of Tāmehana’s studio changes, Pepe Long worked from drawings and photo references, before finally painting in oils. The work took about two months, and is A2 in size ‒ the largest painting the artist has created in some time.
Pepe Long said that even when he was younger, he was not really interested in depicting anything except people in his art.
“It’s the most interesting thing for me, people have always been the thing I want to draw. Usually people that I’m close to. … When you have that close relationship, you’re looking for something you already know about the person you [want] to bring out.”
For the first time, all entries had to be painted portraits of living New Zealanders created from at least one live sitting or direct study from life.
Rae said the winning work “brings acute insight and a remarkably light touch to classical realism. The painter has placed Solomon in an interior that says much about them, but much more can be gleaned from direct characterisation: the mischievous side eye and informal stance, unseen hands stuffed in pockets.
“… In the best tradition of painting, less is definitely more.”
The $2500 runner-up prize was awarded to Carol Bucknell from Waiheke Island, for her work Rita in the Winter Gardens. An additional $1000 third-place prize was awarded to Ilya Volykhine for his work Brett in a Blanket.
The 43 finalist works will be exhibited at the Portrait Gallery from May 21 to August 9. It will tour nationally thereafter.
Most of the artworks will be available for purchase, and people can vote for the $2500 People’s Choice Award until the close of the show in Wellington.