NPG is collaborating on a three-year project that will feature paintings that tell the history of women who have shaped British society.
As part of a three-year commitment to improve the representation of women in the National Portrait Gallery's collection, the gallery has acquired five self-portraits by female painters.
"They aren't merely likeness portraits, when someone is simply portraying themselves." "The significance of these five acquisitions is that they demonstrate not only an artist's complex character, but also the multifaceted identity of women in general," she remarked.
The gallery's collection includes the first painted self-portrait by a black female artist. Självporträtt, kersberga by Everlyn Nicodemus overlays numerous faces in acknowledgment of her roles as artist, writer, mother, and wiz. fe.
In relation to the painting, Nicodemus, who emigrated from Tanzania to Sweden in the 1970s and eventually settled in the UK, said: “I exhibited myself as a subject, showing every part of myself, my problems, my hopes, my conflicts – my whole life … It was a form of psychological survival.”
For more than four decades, Rose Finn-Kelcey was a key presence in the contemporary British art scene. Her work has gotten more attention since her death in 2014 because of its connection with feminism, spirituality, and commodity culture, according to the NPG.
Preparatory Study for "Divided Self," a self-portrait, depicts two images of herself conversing while seated on a bench in London's Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner. Her self-portrait shows how women's voices have traditionally been silenced by speaking to herself in a site where people have made speeches since the mid-nineteenth century.
Chila Kumari Burman appears twice in her 1988 self-portrait Aphrodisiacs Being Socially Constructed, in the roles of a young woman at rest and a young woman in motion.
Celia Paul’s painting, Portrait, Eyes Lowered, is intimate and emotionally intense. It was created as part of a series of self-portraits in conjunction with her 2019 memoir, in which she documents her relationship with Lucian Freud, who painted her many times.
"One of the most challenging things for an artist is to see oneself honestly," she recently said. Hatred of oneself is just as invalid as love of oneself. Both of these statements are false."
Ace (Retrieved) by Susan Hiller is one of a series of portraits and self-portraits based on photobooth pictures. Photobooths, according to Hiller, were an unfiltered media available to everyone, including "those who don't own or can't borrow cameras."
"Many more women will be commemorated on the walls when the National Portrait Gallery reopens next year - not only artists, but women from all walks of life, parliamentarians, designers, gardeners, you name it," she continued.
"For a long time, this has been a problem at a lot of institutions." Female babysitters and jobs by women were both popular for many decades.”
The NPG’s acquisition of the five self-portraits is part of a three-year project in partnership with the Chanel Culture Fund.
