REPORTRAIT
ANNIE KEVANS ANTONY MICALLEF GLENN BROWN JAKE WOOD-EVANS JAMES E SMITH JASLEEN KAUR JULIE COCKBURN MAISIE BROADHEAD MATTHIEU LEGER PAUL STEPHENSON PHILIP GURREY SAMIN AHMADZADEH SASHA BOWLES NOTTINGHAM CASTLE MUSEUM & ART GALLERY 27 MAY — 10 SEPTEMBER 2017
REPORTRAIT The portrait has continued to be one of the most recognised, revisited, and arguably the most celebrated art forms throughout history. Exclusive to Nottingham Castle, this exhibition demonstrates how classical and traditional figurative portraiture continues to inspire artists today, and remains relevant within contemporary artistic discourse. Reportrait presents thirteen British (or British-based) artists who have reimagined historical portraiture, altered or disrupted typical notions of how the portrait is defined, or used an image or reproduction as a starting point to create something new. Consisting of new commissions made in direct response to Nottingham City Museums & Galleries collections, along with loans and works straight from the artist’s studios, the exhibition showcases contemporary reinterpretations of portraiture through painting, photography, installation, digital art, sculpture, video and drawing. Each artwork within this exhibition is rooted in history, whether directly or inferred. When an artist reinterprets an existing portrait from the past into something new, we are left with complex questions about authenticity, authorship, replication and re-contextualisation. At a first glance we may recognise the source – especially where a historic painting, image or sculptural form is familiar to us – but each artist has made an unsettling step forward where original contexts have been exaggerated, altered, removed or even subverted into something fresh, challenging, and ultimately, exciting.
ANNIE KEVANS Annie Kevans paints a wide range of portraits that explore sometimes dark, controversial concepts and alternative histories. Her previous topics have highlighted Nazi collaborators, mistresses of former US presidents, famous figures who suffer with forms of mental illness, and images portraying the sexualisation of childhood. The selection of oil-paintings presented here is taken from her recent Women and the History of Art series. Salvaged from the archives of patriarchal art history, these portraits depict successful but frequently forgotten or overlooked female artists, questioning the gender-bias of art historians who underplay the female contribution to the arts and the underrepresentation of woman artists in galleries worldwide. When viewed as a collection, and en-masse, the paintings broadcast a powerful message that betrays their illusory simplicity.
Annie Kevans, Marie-Gabrielle Capet, 2014 Oil on paper, 40 × 30 cm Courtesy of the artist
The twelve female artists presented here include: Angelica Kauffmann (1741 – 1807), a late 18th century Swiss Neoclassical painter who had a successful career in London and Rome; the 16th Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi (1593 – 1653), one of the most accomplished painters in the generation following that of Caravaggio; Elizabeth Southerden Thompson Butler (1846 – 1933), one of the few female painters to achieve fame for military battle scenes; Marie-Gabrielle Capet (1761 – 1818), a Neoclassical portrait artist who was admitted to the French Royal Academy of Art in 1783 ; the Italian Baroque painter and poet Giulia Lama (1681 – 1747); Käthe Kollwitz (1867 – 1945), an Expressionist German painter, sculpture and printmaker, the first woman elected to the Prussian Academy of Arts; Marie Bracquemond (1840 – 1916) who was described retrospectively as one of “les trois grandes dames” of French Impressionism; Rosalba Giovana Carriera (1673 – 1757), a Venetian Rococo painter and pastelist, elected in 1705 as a member of the the Accademia di San Luca; Dorothea Tanning (1910 – 2012), an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, writer, and poet whose work was heavily influenced by Surrealism; Maria Sol (Marisol) Escobar (1930 – 2016), a US-resident French-Venezuelan artist that was considered as famous and influential as Andy Warhol in the 1960s; Edmonia Lewis (1844 – 1907), the first woman of African American and Native American heritage to achieve international fame and recognition as a sculptor; and Sofonisba Anguissola (1532 – 1625), an Italian Renaissance painter and official court painter for Philip II of Spain.
ANTONY MICALLEF Antony Micallef first appeared on the British art scene in 2000 after winning second prize in the BP Portrait Award competition, and has since exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Academy, Tate Britain and the ICA London, as well as all over the world. Recently departing from his iconoclastic pop-cultural paintings, Micallef now adopts a different, more expressive and self-analytical approach, or what has been described as “engaging with the tradition of portraiture, [he] macerates in order to reinvent and renew” (Paul Moorhouse, Curator of 20th century collections, National Portrait Gallery). Micallef’s depiction of the human body (his own) and use of mark making hint at the influence of his teacher John Virtue (b.1947), a former student of Frank Auerbach (b.1931), also evident in his use of impasto * oil paint, heavily manipulated whilst still wet upon the canvas surface. His backgrounds are often painted thinly, sampled from the luminescent studies of Diego Velázquez (1599 – 1660) or Anthony van Dyck (1599 – 1641), or obliterated completely in the same thick, gory palette as his central protagonists. These techniques create a compelling visual tension, but also a physical one as the buttery, rich paint appears to rest precariously mid-flow upon the canvas, ready to slip away as gravity pulls the facial features further into deformity.
Antony Micallef, Self portrait (chimera no 2), 2016 Oil on linen, 130 × 110 cm Courtesy of the artist
* Impasto is a technique used in painting, where paint is laid on an area of the surface very thickly, usually thick enough that the brush or painting/knife strokes are visible. Paint can also be mixed right on the canvas. When dry, impasto provides texture, the paint appears to be coming out of the canvas.
GLENN BROWN Glenn Brown is one the most revered painters of his generation. At the root of every painting that Brown makes is a work by another artist and he is best known for appropriating art historical references. Rather than studying the original, the artist adapts reproductions of artworks from print, books or the internet by a variety of artists, such as Salvador Dalí (1904 – 1989), Frank Auerbach (b.1931), or Rembrandt (1606 – 1669), and changes colour, position and size. His grotesque yet fascinating figures appear to be painted with thick impasto, but are actually executed through the application of thin, swirling brushstrokes which create the illusion of almost photographically flat surfaces. Reproduction, 2014, is large portrait of a Baroque-styled, green-skinned man with fog-glazed irises, based upon the 1645 painting Bearded Man with a Velvet Cap by the Dutch artist Govert Teunisz. Flinck (1615 – 1660). This is one of the most famous portraits by Flinck who was also a pupil of Rembrandt. Brown first saw this painting at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and took several reference photos of it without the knowledge of museum staff. Not only changing the scale, the artist has also adapted the colour palette to match Tanzerin in Rot, a 1909 painting by lesser known artist Erma Bosel, currently held at the Franz MarcMuseum, Germany. In the last few years, Glenn Brown has extensively embraced drawing. Still conceptually rooted to art historical references, he stretches, combines, distorts and layers images to create subtle yet complex linebased works. He works with Indian ink, acrylic and oil paint on a variety of papers and panels. Dungeness B (2016), named after a Nuclear power station in Kent, is based on a drawing of a woman by Andrea Del Sarto (1486 – 1530) and a drawing of a man by Raphael (that used to be in the Chatsworth House Collection, later auctioned for a record price). The other double-faced drawing in the exhibition entitled Torness One refers to a reactor at the Torness Nuclear Power Station in East Lothian, which was unusually shut down in November 2016 because of seaweed.
Glenn Brown, Reproduction, 2014 Oil on Board, 135 × 101 cm Courtesy of the artist | Gagosian Gallery
JAKE WOOD-EVANS Evoking faded memories and spectres of a past time, Jake Wood-Evans’ oil paintings often depict disintegrating and dissolving moments. With a strong focus on craftsmanship, his work takes inspiration from a diverse range of Baroque Old Masters and contemporary figurative painters. Creating ethereal images that are both unsettling and beautiful, Wood-Evans’ powerful use of light emerges from a loose and instinctive application of paint. His oil paintings shimmer with luminous and intense layers of colour as bold marks, dripping oils and scored surfaces sit in company with fine, delicate detail. In his recent reworking of paintings from Britain’s colonial past, by the male artists who dominated the 18th century such as Francis Cotes (1762 – 1770), Joshua Reynolds (1723 – 1792) and George Romney (1734 – 1802), Wood-Evans is more than a student who simply duplicates the work of those masters he admires. He corrupts the image, enticing us with a glimpse of the original as if it were a ghostly form torn from a half-recalled, half-lost memory, akin to the sitters themselves who are fading or forgotten. Faces or recognisable features are scrubbed away or semi-rendered, appearing as an afterthought to the overall composition. Instead, we focus on the folds of exquisite garments, the reflective qualities of the fashionable silks and lace, the brass buttons or intense reds of military uniforms, and the apparition of an abstracted figure with obscured physiognomy lurking amongst tempestuous, sinister dark grounds. This is a brand new body of work, made exclusively for Nottingham Castle, and includes a response to the collection with a reworking of a portrait of the Nottingham-born poet Philip James Bailey (1816 – 1902) painted in 1884 by John Edgar Williams (c.1821 – 1891).
Jake Wood-Evans, Philip James Bailey, after John Edgar Williams, 2017 Oil on canvas, 82 × 69 cm Commissioned piece in response to the Nottingham Castle Museum art collection
JAMES E SMITH Smith is interested in the relationships which take place when a subject is photographed. Ideas often discussed in art history concerning the role of the viewer, the model and the audience are brought up to date by using new technologies. In Model (2014), we are first presented with a small, illuminated sculpture of a female figure as you begin to progress up the stairs of the South Hall of Nottingham Castle. Ascending further towards the galleries, a large projected film dominates the stairwell overhead. In this film, Smith employs a stranger to sit and have her body recorded by a 3D scanner. In turn, a fixed camera observes this slow process, focusing on the highly intimate and unusual way the artist carefully uses this strange apparatus to inspect her naked body. We see her own discomfort and vulnerability through her facial expressions as the artist moves around her, sometimes within shot or outside of the frame. There is an unease in the work, a feeling of both tenderness and awkwardness which arises from the act of being looked at, inspected and viewed so closely as if an object. It also draws parallels to how Renaissance sculptors, traditionally working with marble or stone for example, would use precision callipers or measuring tools to create an accurate likeness of a sitter during carving. The sculpture on the stairs is a 3D print of the scan which is being created within the film. The broken forms, which are not easily recognisable as the human form, emphasise the limitations of new digital technologies and recording: are the imperfections intentional, the results experimenting with a new material, or are they perhaps a corruption of data transferal from one tool to another? The artist claims that viewing the film and sculpture together present us with two differing forms of portraiture, encouraging us to consider our relationships with the ways in which we see the world.
James E Smith, Model (stills), 2014 Single channel high definition video without sound; 1 hour, 34 minutes and 58 second duration Courtesy of the artist | The Collection: Art and Archaeology in Lincolnshire (Usher Gallery, Lincoln)
JASLEEN KAUR Brought up in a traditional Indian household in Glasgow, Jasleen Kaur is fascinated by the malleability of culture – the continual adaptations and subtle changes in people’s behaviour and traditions. Kaur’s re-imaged objects are at once recognisable and new, borne out of resourcefulness and necessity, reflecting a hybridity of national custom and a reconsideration of everyday routine. Marbled Busts draws parallels between Indian devotional sculpture and the Western tradition of marble bust-making. Kaur has produced three busts in plastic, mimicking the mass-produced buckets often found in hardware shops. While Western busts are traditionally carved from marble to revere and immortalise individuals, mass produced devotional statues are worshipped in the home as a functional part of traditional Indian life. Gods are treated akin to living beings, with rituals intended to humanise them. The bust subjects were identified by the artist as epitomising the intersection of opposing cultural ideas at the core of her practice: her great grandfather, the first family member to migrate from India to Glasgow; Edward Said, a Palestinian American who lived ‘between two worlds’; and Lord Napier, whose great grandfather was a central figure in the narrative of British India. Working collaboratively with a sculptor, Kaur had each figure carved in clay from which moulds were made. The busts are produced using a slush casting process where the effect of commercial plastic marbling is achieved through hand rotation.
Jasleen Kaur, Marbled Busts (one of three), 2015 Polyurethane Plastic and Pigment, 583mm × 340cm × 260mm Commissioned by Jerwood Foundation for Jerwood Makers Open 2015 | Photo: Sylvain Deleu
Extract from Jerwood Makers Open 2015 catalogue.
JULIE COCKBURN Julie Cockburn is renowned for reimagining and reconfiguring found objects and vintage photographs into meticulously constructed and unique contemporary artworks. Having trained as a sculptor at Central Saint Martins in London, Cockburn approaches each work as if working with a three-dimensional form. Using embroidery, collage and painterly techniques, she transforms found photographs by adding a layer of bold geometric patterns, stitching or gestural scrawls, which render the original subject almost unrecognisable. By recontextualising the image, Cockburn opens up the work to new possibilities of narrative and interpretation, provoking dialogue between the contemporary and the historical, gender and identity, the real and the fabricated. Recently, Cockburn has been feeding her completed artworks through the Google Images search engine. This matches her artworks to any photograph or image that has been uploaded to the internet and has similar formal traits or characteristics (such as colour, shape or form). She then sources objects from the real world such as vases, 3D Glasses and cactuses, as suggested by Google, presenting them alongside her embroidered photographs. For Reportrait, instead of Google, Cockburn has searched the Nottingham City Museums and Galleries image databases, pairing five brand new works with artefacts from the Community History, World Cultures and Industrial History collections, creating a wonderful and playful exercise between how the viewer reads and views both image and object.
Julie Cockburn, Jean the Machine, 2017 Hand embroidery on found photograph, 44.6 × 39.5 × 3.75 cm Courtesy of the artist and Flowers Gallery, London
MAISIE BROADHEAD Maisie Broadhead is fascinated by historical objects – particularly portraits in which kings and queens stand dripping with jewels. Her work is often a dialogue between the hand-made object and the photographic image. She recreates classic scenes from historical artworks by artists such as William Hogarth (1697 – 1764), Johannes Vermeer (1632 – 1675), and Diego Velázquez (1599 – 1660), often in collaboration with and modelled by members of the artists own family. Contemporary issues are insinuated as new objects are subtly introduced within the composition. Pearls, a collection of restaged photographs and a video piece based on Baroque portraits of aristocratic women, concentrates on the jewellery at the centre of the image instead of it merely acting as a prop or signifier of the wealth of each sitter. Broadhead almost seems to be punishing her central figures with the burden of this opulent adornment. Her photographs portray shackled wrists, nooses, or long chains that extend out into our world from the edges of the picture frame, interacting with the Castle’s architecture. Along with tongue-in-cheek titles such as Ball and Chain and Heavy Load, we consider the role of women in history but also in contemporary society.
Maisie Broadhead, Purity, 2016 C-type print, frame, shelf and pearls, 117 × 96 × 5 cm Courtesy of the artist and Sarah Myerscough Gallery, London
The video artwork Down Pour was made in collaboration with Jack Cole.
MATTHIEU LEGER The Aldermans is a new series by Matthieu Leger that has been commissioned exclusively for Reportrait. Disinterested in who the sitters within the paintings were, or even who they were painted by, Leger selected works from the Castle’s Fine Art collection based on formal and aesthetic qualities (rather than on status or renown). Seeing the potential and similarities in ceremonial dress – the symbolic red, black and fur-lined robes with the accompanying livery collar – he focussed on a large collection of mid-to-late 19th century portraits of former Nottingham Aldermans; a predominantly male high-ranking position within local Government that was largely obsolete by the 1920s. Leger has produced a series of ‘glitched’ digital-hybrid works which fuse traditional painting techniques with modern trends in computer imagemanipulation. He does this through a series of computer-programmed algorithms that interfere with and corrupt an image, but Leger also uses further photo-collage reproduction and manipulation techniques to control the distortion manually. These digital artworks are then produced as large scale giclée (inkjet) prints on canvas. The weave of the cotton not only simulates the traditional ground upon which paint is applied, but the artist also reworks aspects of these printed images further with oil paint. This technique presents the viewer with an exciting deception – a confusing visual trope that raises questions about how much the artist has created himself and how much the computer has controlled his decisions.
Matthieu Leger, Alderman III, 2016 Oil on Digital Giclee Print on Canvas over Birch, 66 × 76 cm Commissioned by Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery | Courtesy of the artist
PAUL STEPHENSON Where other artists in Reportrait have referred to an original artwork, often working from a reproduction or digital image, Paul Stephenson buys 200-year-old original oil paintings at auction then paints directly upon them. His latest works are palimpsests which explore our contemporary relationships to art, particularly how we consume visual imagery through the veneer of digital technology and how that becomes part of the viewing experience. Stephenson explains that the reflections on the shiny surfaces of our portable devices now merge with the images we see when looking through the screen. He paints clouds or street lights from the environment around us directly onto the surface of an original oil painting, simulating this modern phenomenon. Increasingly, visitors to museums and galleries record their experiences of viewing artwork or exhibitions second-hand through a screen, even when presented with a physical, real painting in front of them. Stephenson mimics facial recognition software by painting yellow square ‘halos’ around the faces on his bought 18th century portraits. “Bansky and the Chapman brothers have all worked on old oil paintings and they were all about the punchline,” notes Stephenson. “But I’m more interested in the relationship with the original artist and the collaborative nature of that. This is proper graffiti… if you take a blank canvas and use a spray can and tag it, it’s not graffiti, it’s just spray can art on a blank canvas. What makes it graffiti is that it has to be done on a surface that has already lived, already has had an existence that wasn’t intended for being written on. These oil paintings, they weren’t intended for me to change… In that sense, it’s graffiti.”
Paul Stephenson, Reflection on Jane Camp, 1877 and 2016 Ink on oil on canvas (original painting by Alexander Melville, 1877), 128 × 102 cm Courtesy of the artist and Stolenspace, London
PHILIP GURREY Philip Gurrey pays homage to specific historical movements and political occurrences through what he calls ‘painted investigations’. The four works within this exhibition broadly display the artist’s research where he uses the painted language of the Dutch golden age, the influence of Francisco Goya, and elements of the Castle’s collection for his latest commission. By borrowing elements directly from various portraits by 17th century Flemish painters Peter Paul Rubens (1577 – 1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599 – 1641), Gurrey sculpts, through paint, unnatural, mutated and malformed faces. These disconcerting portraits aim to reflect a new vision of an age which saw power shift away from the monarchy and religion towards trade and money, considered by many as the birth of modern society. Employing a slightly different technique, After Goya #1 (2010) is a contemporary re-working of Francisco Goya’s iconic work Cristo crucificado (1780). Gurrey isolates the head and employs a new colour palette forcing the subject to become an image on its own terms: “I have attempted to secularise the heavily loaded, sacred signifiers which are present in Goya’s original work”. For his latest work, Gurrey took the 1910 oil sketch The Harvesters by William Shackleton (1872 – 1933) from the Castle’s Fine Art collection as initial inspiration for a homage to Nottingham-born artist Harold Knight RA (1874 – 1961). “Being a conscientious objector, Knight was forced into manual farm labour during WW1. I have overlaid a readymade of the type of rake he would have used during his service, which, according to some accounts, caused him serious health problems due to his somewhat weak physical constitution.” This rake, also suspended in Shackleton’s depiction of a female land worker, hangs in the same position above a likeness of Knight, helping to balance the composition but also appearing as a symbol of a crucifix or Death’s scythe. Dame Laura Knight RA (1877 – 1970), Harold’s wife and also a celebrated Nottingham-born painter, was the only woman to be given war commissions for both World Wars and the only British artist to cover the Nuremberg trials in 1946. Gurrey states “The contradiction between [Laura’s] pro war propaganda paintings and [Harold’s] refusal to fight was my main motivation for making the work – the hand of the state set against the will of the individual.” Philip Gurrey, Homage to Harold Knight, 2017 Oil & Harvester’s Rake on Canvas, 170 × 170 cm Commissioned by Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery | Courtesy of the artist
SAMIN AHMADZADEH Identity is complex. Society often identifies people by race, nationality, religion, gender, or even vocation. Yet identity is also intensely personal and reflects an individual human being’s lived experience. Samin Ahmadzadeh shreds and interweaves photographs from an individual’s life. The past appears as interlaced fragments, much as it is stored and recalled in our minds. The artist makes personal and intimate photographic collections which transcend memorial function. In so doing she opens them for social, cultural, and historical interpretation. The final outcome is a series of multi-layered images, each containing a mix of several figures and stories. Each of these images underscores the message that an individual is ultimately a composite of varied influences and experiences. This 500-piece installation is a combination of two separate personal archives from both the Middle East and Western Europe: photographs of Ahmadzadeh’s own Iranian family, and an extensive donation of albums by a Brighton-based photographer Tim Andrews. Through the sheer depth and variety of experiences in the life of a person and that of their ancestors, geographic and cultural differences become less apparent and instead give way to a portrait of a common humanity. Whereas history is often cited as a reason for fundamental differences between human beings, in this work, it is the very root of overlapping identities and a common future.
Samin Ahmadzadeh, Recollection, 2016 – 17 Installation of 504 handwoven photographs on birch ply – 10 cm diameter circles, 1.8 cm thick Commissioned by Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery | Courtesy of the artist
SASHA BOWLES Dealing with illusion, interventions, metamorphosis, taxonomies and provisional structures, Sasha Bowles reworks Old Masters from printed reproductions sourced from exhibition catalogues, postcards or museum archives. She mischievously re-contextualises these images by concealing all flesh and limbs, replacing hands and heads with intricately painted non-human forms and alien modifications; brightly coloured orbs, elaborately impossible ruffs, lace-like cones, or hairy growths omit from collars and sleeves. She aims to continue the ongoing conversation between artists throughout art history, questioning our relationship to the ownership of images, and to “re-present and subvert classical narratives, cloaking the figures to open up new possibilities”. For this exhibition, Bowles has designed a unique structure that contains twelve reinterpretations of key oil paintings currently on display in the Castle (or held within the Museum’s wider collection). She describes it as “a museum within a museum”, which not only relates to the architecture of our Victorian-converted galleries, but also to a storage or transport crate that is used when artworks are loaned out for display. Reminiscent of a traditional salon hang, the exterior panels are made from picture frames that have been secured tightly together. Two walls unfold as ramps, openly inviting you to explore the interior but also indicating that the structure can be packed up and relocated. Inside, the décor has simulated flourishes of the skirting boards, wooden flooring and colours of the Castle’s galleries, and also where you encounter twelve new artworks in display boxes or antique wall-mounted frames. The small space is necessary to create an intimate and individual setting, to give the visitor the time to examine these paintings in a new, personal way.
Sasha Bowles, Queen Golden Orbs, 2017 Oil on digital print, 33 × 28 cm Commissioned by Nottingham Castle Museum & Art Gallery | Courtesy of the artist
REPORTRAIT 27 May — 10 September 2017 Curated by Tristram Aver NOTTINGHAM CASTLE MUSEUM & ART GALLERY Off Friar Lane Castle Place Nottingham NG1 6EL nottinghamcastle.org.uk @NottmCastle /NottinghamCastle @nottinghamcastle
Design: Mark El-khatib