Some Thoughts About Portrait Artist of the Year, a British TV Show
Portrait Artist of the Year 2019 Season 5, Episode 8, Sky Arts; Artist: Rebecca Train, Sitter: Daniel Lismore
One of my guilty pleasures is binge-watching creativity reality shows, especially from the UK. We’ve got the Great Pottery Throw Down, where the judge, a great hulking potter in overalls with a Wallace and Gromit face, bursts into tears every time he sees a beautifully made ceramic. There’s Blown Away, a glass-blowing show with lots of macho folk blowing glass sweatily. And there’s Landscape Artist of the Year. But my all-time favorite is Sky Art’s Portrait Artist of the Year.
Stern positioning two fabric-wrapped models during a shoot in Chelsea in 2022. Photo by Jaymye Thomas
In 2018, I interviewed David Samuel Stern about his process of creating woven photographic portraits. In these portraits, he interlaced photographs into intricate, tactile artworks, emphasizing the medium’s tangible qualities. Stern has been relentlessly exploring what it means to portray through photography and the medium’s place as a recorder of time and nature. Since our initial interview, he has produced captivating new work. Here, we survey his evolution over the last six years and his current work.
Ernesto Renda and Katie Hector in their studios. Images courtesy of the artists.
Ernesto Renda and I first met on the internet, as more and more artists do. A follow turned into likes, which developed into mutual curiosity and respect for each other’s practice. Renda, who lives in New York, and I in Los Angeles, kept in touch for months, viewing miniature backlit versions of the other’s work while each suspecting there was more than met the eye. As fate would have it, Renda’s solo exhibition, The Moment of Truth, opened at Moskowitz Bayse in Los Angeles; subsequently, my solo exhibition, EGO RIP, opened at Management in New York City two weeks later. Viewing the work in person was enlightening and generated conversations around material play, intuition, and the verisimilitude of our subjects. These brief yet poignant chats inspired us to pose the questions below from the perspective of one visual practitioner to another.
Portraiture, Archives, and Representation: Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle
On the left: Jonathan Ojekunle. Shining Light, 2022. Oil, acrylic on canvas. 60 x 48 in. Courtesy of the artist and The Immigrant Artist Biennial. Courtesy NARS Foundation. Photographed by Young Yu Don.
Oftentimes, in thinking about the representation of the human form in art, people can get very attached to the ‘abstraction’ versus ‘figuration’ binary. These respective styles frequently get coded as opposites, and certain kinds of politics are ascribed to each. For example, ‘figuration’ is coded as a kind of politics of representation, whereas ‘abstraction’ is a politics of refusal or resistance to legibility. However, the work of Golnar Adili, Erika DeFreitas, and Jonathan Ojekunle, all on view in The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone, functions beyond this binary in fresh ways. We interviewed the artists about portraiture and its relationship with archives and representation.
Ernst Röhm, 1981, Graphite, gouache, marker, and color pencil on paper. 54 3/4 x 47 1/4 inches
Who was Stephane Mandelbaum? A closeted gay man? The child of Holocaust survivors? A liar? A thief? A brilliant artist you’ve never heard of? All of the above and perhaps more.
The Drawing Center is presenting the first-ever show of Mandelbaum’s work in the US, and it is a show that left me gob-smacked. The combination of Mandelbaum’s brilliant drawing, deeply personal vision, and the complexity of his backstory is a tale made for cinema. Born in 1961 to a family of paternal Polish Holocaust survivors and maternal Belgian Armenians, Mandelbaum grew up in the town of Namur, about an hour and a half from Brussels. His Father, Ari, was a well-known painter, and his mother, Pili, was an illustrator. There is no record of siblings. A gifted draftsman from a young age but dyslexic and eccentric, Mandelbaum moved from Namur to Brussels, where he seemed to devote his time to making drawings and engaging in what is termed “petty crime.” He married a woman from Zaire (now called The Democratic Republic of Congo) and lived between the worlds of Belgian Africans, the Belgian crime underworld, and his own artistic imagination.
Journalist and author Julia Szabo is resolved to establish the world’s first museum to be built by women for women artists. MSeum is going to be a museum with a focus on overlooked artists (Know Unknowns), providing art storage space to creative women and their heirs and offering the most enriching museum experience for blind and low-vision visitors anywhere in the world, with a variety of tactile artworks and architectural features inviting touch, because loss of sight does not mean loss of vision.
Technically, Edouard Manet (1832–1883) and Edgar Degas (1834–1917 are not Impressionists; instead, they are Realists whose works owe a debt to Gericault, Goya, and Daumier and the invention of photography. Unlike Monet, who sought solace and inspiration in nature, which can be seen as a reaction to the urbanization associated with the rise of the bourgeoisie, Manet and Degas instead embraced the industrialization and urbanization driven by bourgeois economic interests. They were unconcerned with the dehumanizing effects of rapid technological advancement. Realism is aimed at depicting scenes and subjects based on the everyday lives of ordinary people.
Jonathan Torres is a Puerto Rican artist born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He is based in Brooklyn, NY since 2010 and was recently a resident at the Sharpe Walentas Studio Program in DUMBO. In his paintings and sculptures a sense of otherworldliness and living in the diaspora recur. For over 15 years, Torres’ practice has grown from exploring different emotional and mental stages that have affected the way people interact with each other throughout various stages of life—crisis and anxiety with a bent of dark humor that have been crucial to the development of Torres’ imagery.
When she was eight years old, Isabelle Plat’s mother took her to the museum in Lyons, France, to see a show of works by the School of Paris. The young artist remembers being enchanted by the works of Matisse and Soutine and then and there decided she would be painter. Flash forward a decade and Plat was working toward her baccalaureate at the prestigious École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, which offered a rigorous five-year program of academic training. Plat concentrated on sculpture, following the age-old practice of drawing and modeling from antique casts.
I’ve been to more art fairs than I can count, but the ones that I’ve had fun at I could count on two hands. Many are too big, dealers are either stressed out or bored, mundane work or work that is inaccessible or silly. The last show that I went to before the pandemic was The Armory Show at the westside piers. It was a few days before the world shut down and the fair was eerily empty. I wandered alone through a fair that typically had been jam packed with beautiful art lovers. And then everything went quiet for about a year and a half.
