The portrait was once a highly esteemed powerful tool for self representation. Royalty, political leaders and even artists themselves used portraiture as a means to express personal power, opinion and personality. Even with the advent of photography, portraiture remained one of the world’s most powerful tools for explaining one's character to the world. Fredrick Douglas made himself the most photographed person in the world during his time so as to push for the recognition of his existence, power and basic human rights. Some of art history's most important artworks are portraits from Leonard DaVinci’s Mona Lisa, Jan Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard’s Self Portrait with Two Pupils to the Fayum Mummy Portraits. This small sample only begins to uncover the complexity of purpose found in portraiture.
However, in our era of image bombardment where one might come across hundreds of pictures of people on social media and the internet in one sitting the power and thought of historic portraiture has somewhat been lost. The intense personal nature of true portrait paint offers something beyond the three second examination of another person’s Selfie on an Instagram Story. Yet, it is harder and harder to find artists delving deep in the challenging, complex and often painful realm of portraiture and authentic human representation. It takes a great deal of personal commitment and often vulnerability to paint another person honestly… as John Singer Sargent once remarked “Every time I paint a portrait I lose a friend.”
We do not believe portraiture is a lost art, but rather one that is harder and harder to master in a world continually pulled from the intimate and personal. Today the act of looking at a “portrait” of a person takes place in seconds on a phone screen rather than a true long look at a painting, photograph or sculpture. It is for this reason that we wish to focus on and highlight the difficult art of portraiture in our Spring exhibition and encourage the art of long practiced looking at portraits of real people.
The artist list: Lorenzo Amos, Miriam Beerman, Sara Berman, Louise Bourgeois, Nell Brookfield, Michal Chelbin, Charlie Gosling, George Grosz, Lewinale Havette, Phoebe Helander, Jane Hilton, Esme Hodsoll, Sergey Kononov, Maria Kreyn, Ronan Day-Lewis, Asher Liftin, Susan Meiselas, Jonathan Meesse, Rodrigo Moynihan, Lisa Ross, David Smalling, Dash Snow, Astrid Styma, Yuwei Tu, Frances Waite, Rachel Wolf, Deanio X, Teona Yamanidze, Robert Zeller, Leah Ke Yi Zheng.
