No trip to London is arguably complete without a visit to the National Portrait Gallery and its Portrait Award, relaunched the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024. This is the latest in a long tradition of portrait awards, open to submissions from across the world. This year, 1647 entries came from 62 countries with 50 shortlisted portraits. I will focus on five.
Portraits are intriguing as they focus on the subject – a loved one, a model, a famous person – trying to represent them, their reality. At the same time, they are special through the way they capture the person, which, in turn, is a window into the artist. So, they are two portraits in one – the sitter and the artist. In addition, no person is independent of their times, so portraits also shed light on the times and the culture of the (then) present. Each painting is in dialogue with past master portraitists as each artist has their own “painterly ancestors” who influenced their style and approach and to whom they owe a debt. Even autodidacts are not immune to history. Finally, there is the intention behind the painting – what the painter is focusing on getting across – and what we take away, which may be different, but arguably also meaning. And, of course, there is the question of technique and style. Each painting has many layers, and it is up to us to choose what we wish to see and explore.
At this year’s Portrait Award, as in many past ones, there is a collection of impressive realism, where the paintings are so perfect they could be photos. The concentration and focus of the artist have to be lauded. Massimiliano Pironti’s Agnese (2023, oil on aluminium) is stunning. The skin and the hands, each so hard to get right in a painting, are perfect, as are the folds in her dress. Her body, while still, is in movement – the turned head, the twisting neck, the forward, the protective left shoulder, the one hand in contemplative status, the other hugging herself. Agnese, a dancer, is there, real, timeless, yet not. The hand points to a tattoo of a specific date – “23042018” – “the date she accepted her alopecia, a condition that causes hair loss, and shaved off all her hair.” Looking again, the form of the body is lightly coiled like a spring and suggests an arguable weary internal energy, perhaps the currents of her thoughts on her condition and her struggle. This is combined with the self-protecting position of her arm and the reflective hand. She has decided to share her condition and her private reality, and this becomes public with the painting and public in her dance. At first sight, the painting is simply one of beauty and perfection. In reality, it is about fragility, openness, courage and resolution. And hence, ultimately, about strength.
A Moment (2024), the self-portrait by Dawn Beckles, also includes a date – 1981, the year the artist was born. It is a celebration of colours, suggesting happiness, which creates additional energy through the contrast with the internal reflective status as she looks down and away, her hands in her pockets. The texture in her multi-media (acrylic, gold leaf and oil on canvas) is very different from the photo-realism of Massimiliano Pironti’s Agnese and achieves its power differently. Both focus on personal reflection – Dawn Beckles on a “fleeting moment of happiness” and Pironti’s Agnese on a personal decision to present her condition to the world. But Dawn’s choice of the word “fleeting” suggests a wider context of a reality of less-than-happy moments, a window onto a personal landscape. Again, a courageous reveal to the public.
Another powerful portrait is Nathan Young’s Monument 3 (2024), the artist’s “attempt at solidifying my memories” of his deceased father. Only one eye, nose and ear are clearly portrayed, the others only an eroded memory, like the only part-represented mouth, no longer able to communicate. The body is close to gone, ghost-like, but still has a strong presence; it is almost like looking through the veil of death to find the father, lost, receding but still there, being held by the painter’s, the son’s paint. It is beautiful, a generous sharing of a very private moment. The way it is painted also reminds me of some aspects of Giacometti’s portraits, with their focus on the head and often unformed upper body, using a hundred grey and black lines to represent the face. The connection imbues the painting with additional historical gravitas, for me at least.
Next to it is Alexander Macdonald’s Poppy (2023), a photo-realistic painting of the artist’s son’s partner – where the artist wished to “depict a strong young woman with a sense of optimism.” As with Agnese, Poppy is beautifully rendered – the skin, hands, cloth. Its strong sense of life contrasts with the veil of death and longing in Monument 3. Interestingly, the two communicate with each other and mutually reinforce the messages, an (I presume) accidental additional dialogue from the judge’s selection. It is also worth noting that the portrait is built on twenty sittings. Anyone looking at the painting would be forgiven to think it was a portrait from a photo, but it is a work of commitment and persistence by the artist and the sitter. Would you commit to twenty sittings for an artist? That itself is a declaration of commitment.
As a final example of the portraits (and I have not shown the prize winners as they will get plenty of well-deserved attention anyway), I was pulled in by Shane Keisuke Berkery’s A Self-Portrait (2024). This is a double self-portrait with a non-literal version of himself painting a more traditional self-portrait with a distorted hand, suggesting clumsiness or constraint that, in turn, is perhaps a statement of his modesty – that an artist’s hand can never fully picture the extent of personal reality. The portrait also represents the Irish-Japanese painter’s dog, Milo, who suffered a traumatic event. It, therefore, also speaks to the loss in Monument 3, as well as the condition in Agnese, and again creates a reinforcing dialogue on a connecting theme across the paintings in the exhibition. The artist says the “outward presentation of ourselves seldom accurately reflects our internal world,” which he captures by his two selves depicted here – with one of his selves looking at the other (self-reflection, self-interrogation) who looks out of the plane of the painting over our right shoulder, though clearly his mind is not on what is on our right, but focused on some thought in his mind, again a private moment shared, powerfully.
There are so many more paintings worth writing about, but just like there are only so many spaces on a wall for the selection of paintings, there is only so much space for words in an article. For the other 45 portraits (and for a better look at the five introduced here), go to the Herbert Smith Freehills Portrait Award 2024 until 27 October 2024. Forthcoming exhibitions include Francis Bacon’s The Human Presence (10 October 2024 to 19 January 2025) and the Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize 2024 (14 November 2024 to 23 February 2025). And if you are quick, you can still see Six Lives: The Stories of Henry VIII’s Queens until 8 September 2024.
