Face to Face II

About

The dawn of the 21st century has allowed Portraiture to free itself from standardised canons and traditional conventions, opening up a new chapter of this artistic current, prompting today’s artists to explore the genre in an even more independent and unique manner.  

Following decades of focus on abstraction, in the 1980s and '90s, painters began to re-embrace figuration, adapting it to the demands of contemporary art and respond to specific contexts, identity questions, and social issues. With the support of Photography as the primary medium for truthful illustration, Portraiture began to broaden its borders exploring meaningful undertones and conveying significant messages. It seems that the representation of the body has become a vehicle for artists to carry their thoughts and feelings.

Over the centuries, Portraiture has also often involved issues of privilege, raising the question of who has access to representation and who is erased. Intended as the representation of people, the development of the genre paradoxically reveals a history of forgotten bodies, who have been marginalised and overlooked, exploited and appropriated, or diminished and fetishised.

Nowadays many artists redress this exclusion of subjects from the preceding canon of art on account of gender, class, sex or race. This is done not only through the choice of the subject matter, but also in the act of painting itself.   Women, who have been frequently used as sitters with recurrent objectifying traits, are now able to stand on the other side of the canvas and to reclaim their own image. This shift from represented object (or excluded object) to creating subject is a powerful one. Keeping control of their own representation, it means emancipating themselves from stereotypical traits such as composure, sensuality and deference.   

The reciprocal nature of the title Face to Face (as in looking at each other) suggests the exhibition’s aim to subvert the exclusionary history of portraiture. Whilst illustrating today’s innumerable stylistic possibilities of Portraiture, the artists in this exhibition reiterate their role as creating subjects subverting the male gaze that has historically been the main focus of view and representation.