Amani’s portrait, with its strict monochrome and inward intensity of expression, senses our unease as we slid into lockdown unknown. Amani Tia and Adrian Lazzaro have both managed to encapsulate and at the same time, bookend this extraordinary period of COVID-19 isolation. Throughout time, the ability of a portrait to provide not only a window to the soul but to be able to reflect back to the viewer a snapshot of the human condition is unparalleled. By connecting with work made in the studio, three of Arts Project’s team explore both the intimate nuances and expansive complexity of portraiture. At Arts Project Australia, artists continue to ingeniously portray the human face and its infinite multitudes. Traversing history, it is evident that the portrait remains an eminent fixture of artistic practice.
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Yet, portraiture’s breadth doesn’t discount us from considering artists’ capacity to continuously interpret and depict human emotion and experience within this medium. Capturing the face, the human body’s centric feature, extends back millennia the oldest known representation of a human face heralds from the ice age (and lives on in the Burrup Peninsula rock library in Western Australia). Generous support is provided by The Brown Foundation, Inc., of Houston.Portraiture can’t be neatly defined. Major support is provided by Anne Cox Chambers and Helen and Charles Schwab.
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Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection is sponsored by Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection is curated by Dana Miller, Richard DeMartini Family Curator and Director of the Permanent Collection and Scott Rothkopf, Deputy Director for Programs and Nancy and Steve Crown Family Chief Curator with Mia Curran, Curatorial Assistant Jennie Goldstein, Assistant Curator and Sasha Nicholas, consulting curator.
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Through their varied takes on the portrait, the artists represented in Human Interest raise provocative questions about who we are and how we perceive and commemorate others. Many contemporary artists confront this situation, stressing the fluidity of identity in a world where technology and the mass media are omnipresent. Most recently, the proliferation of smartphones and the rise of social media have unleashed an unprecedented stream of portraits in the form of snapshots and selfies. Readily reproducible and ever-more accessible, photography has played a particularly vital role in the democratization of portraiture. Once a rarefied luxury good, portraits are now ubiquitous. Some revel in the genre’s glamorous allure, while others critique its elitist associations and instead call attention to the banal or even the grotesque. Many artists reconsider the pursuit of external likeness-portraiture’s usual objective-within formal or conceptual explorations or reject it altogether. Yet the works included in this exhibition propose diverse and often unconventional ways of representing an individual.
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Portraits are one of the richest veins of the Whitney’s collection, a result of the Museum’s longstanding commitment to the figurative tradition, which was championed by its founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. This sense of connection is one of portraiture’s most important aims, whether memorializing famous individuals long gone or calling to mind loved ones near at hand. Some of these groupings concentrate on focused periods of time, while others span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to forge links between the past and the present. Bringing iconic works together with lesser-known examples and recent acquisitions in a range of mediums, the exhibition unfolds in eleven thematic sections on the sixth and seventh floors. Drawn entirely from the Museum’s holdings, the more than two hundred works in the exhibition show changing approaches to portraiture from the early 1900s until today. Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection offers new perspectives on one of art’s oldest genres.