The concert pianist is the subject of one of the entries in this year’s Archibald Prize.

Among the hundreds of entries in this year’s Archibald Prize is a dark, brooding portrait of concert pianist Simon Tedeschi, painted by Loribelle Spirovski – who happens to be his partner.

Tedeschi has form when it comes to Australia’s most popular prize for portraiture, held annually at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. In 2002, he was the subject of Cherry Hood’s Archibald-winning portrait: a watercolour that depicted the then cherubic looking 20-year old with a bare chest and piercing blue eyes.

Spirovski’s painting is a deeper, darker, multi-layered work featuring a series of superimposed manifestations of the musician in a suit, including a powerful memento mori reference in the hollowed eye and disappearing flesh of one of the heads. There is also the glimpse of a bare chest but Tedeschi says that it is not a reference to Hood’s portrait. “It is more of a nod to a thematic constant in Loribelle’s work, which explores the fragility of people who are or who have been close to her and it is sort of...