Not the best flyer, but a nice little portraiture show from the likes of Swoon, Matt Small, Elbowtoe, Best ever and more at Shoreditch’s Blackall Studios. The PV is this Thursday November 5, from 6pm.
More info after the jump.
Portraiture goes to the heart of how we relate to other people. When we look into someone’s eyes, we try to see what they really think, what we think we have in common and how we can understand them…
Represent brings together a group of contemporary artists whose work deals with exactly these issues. Each artist has strived to develop their own unique approach to portraiture, a field of art once reserved for those who were important or rich enough to afford it, but now treated as a means for contemporary artists to explore the diverse issues that affect today’s fragmented society. Each artist paints portraits as a kind of social activity, to try to understand that other person and in the process to make their own mark in the social network.
Within this, the artists have their own distinctive projects and voices that they use portraiture as a vehicle to articulate. For Gavin Nolan, it is the aberrations and abnormalities that make faces stand out, as if irregular souls should have irregular faces too, or for Yuko Nasu, it is a means of working out what others are, what might be wrong with them, what might be wrong with looking at them…and articulating this process of recognition and understanding in the sweep and smudge of brush and oils.
Represent brings together some of the most exciting portrait artists of the moment to give an insight into exactly these issues, and to show how portraiture is being used outside the establishment, not as a BP portrait commission for photographic accuracy, but as a vital, energetic, innovative and insightful means of working out how we all fit together.
- Tags: Blackall Studios, Elbowtoe, Matt Small, Private View
