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B y the second half of the 20th century, art critics routinely announced the death of painting with every new technological and aesthetic innovation. And yet portraiture — in the classic, realist sense — has become increasingly essential and visible in recent years. For one, there is an institutional urgency to speak to a more diverse audience. Moreover, it is increasingly stabilising and reassuring to look at the work of an artist who is able to depict a reality that is material and grounded in recognition.
With this in mind, let us take a look at selection of portraiture highlights from the upcoming Contemporary Art Online sale.
Raffi Kalenderian, Brad in the Studio
For Raffi Kalenderian, the entire painting is the portrait: the room, the sitter, the clothes, the plants. In this way, the artist abandons traditional modes of portraiture in favour of lively images filled with experimental paint handling and vivacious patterning.
Studying under the pupilage of Laura Owens at UCLA, Kalenderian took inspiration from the titans of art history including Van Gogh and Michelangelo, as well as Modern Masters such as David Hockney and Alice Neel. Such art historical references are certainly discernible in Brad in the Studio, in which heady textures and dynamic materiality are combined with an unrestrained approach to the organisation of space. The result is an effortlessly cool aesthetic.
Sarah Lucas, Self Portrait with Knickers
Posing simultaneously as tough and abject, macho but female, Sarah Lucas’ Self Portrait with Knickers creates an image of defiant femininity. Photographic self-portraits have been an important element of Lucas's work since the early 1990s. Through them, the artist presents an identity which serves to challenge stereotypical representations of gender and sexuality.
Androgynous t-shirts and leather jackets feature in many of the artist’s images, including the now infamous pop-punk Self-Portrait with Fried Eggs, 1996. In Self Portrait with Knickers from 1994, Lucas stands, hands on her hips, her dark-coloured clothing contrasting with the white underwear strung up on a washing line behind her. In all these images her gaze back at the viewer is direct and uncompromising. In this way, Lucas powerfully resignifies the male gaze as a weapon of supremacy.
Armand Boua, Untitled
Armand Boua’s work deals with the human condition as a response to the inhumanity he witnesses in the world around him. Depicting the formless figures of forgotten children, Boua’s recent works testify to the violence that continues to characterise the political struggles of his hometown Abidjan, West Africa.
Working in Abidjan, the economic capital of Ivory Coast, at the crossroads of urbanisation and industrialisation, Boua experiences the Ivorian landscape with a heightened sensitivity. His observations of children are drawn largely from street scenes where urban migrations create ethnic, linguistic, cultural and social entanglements that have come to enrich and problematise the region in equal measure.
As in Untitled, Boua gives the marginalised shape through poetic forms and emotive expressions, evoking images and scenes in remembrance.
