Drawn into the Present: Portraits on Paper
Bringing together portraits from the 20th century to the present day, this exhibition traces a line through the varied approaches taken by artists to depict their subjects on paper. Often focussed on the head and shoulders of an individual, a portrait typically seeks to convey something of a person鈥檚 personality and inner life through the treatment of their form and environment. In ink, pencil, charcoal and paint, the artist captures the subtleties of their subject鈥檚 facial features and expressions to lay bare the interior landscape of the individual, as well as their own relationship to them, whether informed by lived experience or imagined encounters.
Certain motifs emerge and recur across particular groupings of work within the exhibition, drawing connective lines between the portraits. While some artists take prominent figures from both the past and present as their subject, others draw upon their immediate relationships to create likenesses of their friends, family and acquaintances, or depict themselves in self-portraits. In turn, some of the portraits on view directly respond to art-historical lineages, as artists reconceive well-known images or works of art within the register of their own practice, while others seek to break away from the conventions of the genre. Yet, despite this variety in approach, of foremost concern across the breadth of historical and contemporary works represented in the exhibition is a shared conceptualisation of portraiture as a boundless site of creative innovation and expression.
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Bringing together portraits from the 20th century to the present day, this exhibition traces a line through the varied approaches taken by artists to depict their subjects on paper. Often focussed on the head and shoulders of an individual, a portrait typically seeks to convey something of a person鈥檚 personality and inner life through the treatment of their form and environment. In ink, pencil, charcoal and paint, the artist captures the subtleties of their subject鈥檚 facial features and expressions to lay bare the interior landscape of the individual, as well as their own relationship to them, whether informed by lived experience or imagined encounters.
Certain motifs emerge and recur across particular groupings of work within the exhibition, drawing connective lines between the portraits. While some artists take prominent figures from both the past and present as their subject, others draw upon their immediate relationships to create likenesses of their friends, family and acquaintances, or depict themselves in self-portraits. In turn, some of the portraits on view directly respond to art-historical lineages, as artists reconceive well-known images or works of art within the register of their own practice, while others seek to break away from the conventions of the genre. Yet, despite this variety in approach, of foremost concern across the breadth of historical and contemporary works represented in the exhibition is a shared conceptualisation of portraiture as a boundless site of creative innovation and expression.
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