- Venue
- The National Gallery
- Location
- London
“We’ve arrived at one definition of the portrait painter’s prime aspiration: to record without words the internal life of the individual” Rose Tremain
The National Portrait Gallery always manage to out-do themselves with the annual BP Portrait Award which is a shining beacon of rising portrait artists and their individual interpretations of what portraiture means to them and the world. There is an abundance of work that has come with influences from Abstract art to American 20th Century styled realism, a hint of Surrealism and some of the most intense, striking imagery seen yet. A record 2,177 entrants submitted work and fifty-eight were shortlisted for a shot at the biggest Portrait competition in the world.
There are intimate and personal portraits of friends or family to revealing portraits of celebrity sitters and the exhibition presents this variety of approaches and styles to illustrate the vitality of contemporary portrait.
It is always interesting to examine the award winners and the most important is not necessarily the First Prize winner but rather the Visitor’s Choice pieces which this year awarded First Place to iDeath by Michal Ozibko, Second Place to Sentinel by Lyndsey Jameson and Third Place to Le Grand Natan by Daniel Enkaoua. Michal says it was his classmate’s everyday street persona which attracted him to portray her with an iPod, the most common symbol of modernity in this Century. On the other hand, there was deeper sentimental value with Lyndsey and Daniel’s pieces which chose child family members as subjects of reminding audiences about the child within ourselves.
From here, the exhibit’s shortlist included a majority of adult sitters that were from overlooked walks of life such as Jason Butler’s The Rubbish Bin Men or Kaye Hodges The Hockey Player, Marden Russets which together, compare the success of the youth of today with the failure of previous generations. Of course there are a dominant number of photo-realistic portraits with the few raw, stronger portraits and more Abstract work begins to develop further to the point of being unidentifiable. The case of this pure thick and raw palette portrait is Giampaolo Russo’s Portrait of Giuseppe, which is so heavy in oil paints on canvas that it brings out the best of 16th Century painting. Similarly, Geneva by Ilaria Rosselli del Turco captures an essence of 19th Century portraiture that has visual representation of Spanish or French style. A portrait which has it’s own style of being a ghostly, haunting piece is the best way to describe From My Soul I Cannot Hide by David Nightingale, morphing the same or different sitters together with a possible Francis Bacon-esque influence. It is a relief to witness some Surrealism within a portrait this case being The True Self-Portrait by Carlos Muro, which uses mirrors to the point of questioning perspective and the character of the sitter. Recognisable celebrities include London Mayor Boris Johnson, actor Alan Rickman and more but it is the First Place winner that really does set the tone for portrait this year, Daphne Todd’s Last Portrait of Mother. The portrait is definitely personal and without words paints a very sincere picture of the artist’s mother at deathbed in an unearthly tone in this devotional study of someone who had just reach her 100th birthday. This is a form that immortality that you cannot always achieve.
