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The BP Portrait Award — Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

Love it or hate it, the BP Portrait Award is back again. It is often either exalted as a wonderful exercise in human soul searching and a celebration of the artist’s skill, or derided as “the art equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest” before that became ironic, as the Guardian’s Jessica Lack put it. This year, open to all artists over 18 (rather than just those under 40, as in previous years), the competition has attracted 1,870 submissions, a record high since its inception in 1980. The sixty selected by this year’s jury are on display at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh until April, representing a staggering diversity of both subjects and approaches. Friends, family members, celebrities and even an anonymous commuter are rendered in styles ranging from the poor end of an evening art class to intense photorealism, loose impressionism and surrealism. Not bad, considering that painted portraiture was once considered to be ‘dying out’ in the modern world.

In some ways, encouraging painted portraiture in the modern world is difficult, given how tricky it can be to divorce the idea of a painted portrait from its most basic: a realistic representation of a person. And unfortunately, few paintings in the exhibition manage to get past this. The many photorealistic portraits, for example, are an interesting demonstration of technical skill, but not necessarily of artistic ability. Some of the submissions, however, do make attempts to engage with the genre in a new way. In “Nisha” by Darvish Fakhr, a young girl sits on a stool in a Disney princess ball gown and plastic children’s jewellery – a dark and cheapened take on Velazquez’s paintings of Spanish court princesses. Timothy Hyman’s “She and Me” is inspired in composition by Rembrandt’s self portraits of the artist poised at the canvas, yet in execution is highly expressionistic. Emmanouil Bitakis’ “Portrait” sets the subject in a surreal landscape in which he floats beside a flower, a fly and a moth, with a separate painting of a male nude below. The genre is bent in other ways too. For example, “Time to Talk” by Lynn Ahrens, which depicts a strange, distorted, unidentifiable, androgynous creature whose semi-abstract form is strongly rooted not in the quality of the subject, but of the paint, moves us uncomfortably away from what we expect from a portrait. The surreal “A. C. Grayling” by Thomas Leveritt shows the professor sitting reading in the midst of a melting ice-flow of dripping words, dissolving into his element, as it were.

However, whilst there are interesting interpretations of a genre that initially seems limited, the ultimate issue is not the genre, but the generally dull level of the exhibition. For, despite the increased number of applicants, the diversity of style and the technical proficiency that many display, there seems little in the way of expressive power. Much of it is reduced to clever play, rather than any genuine exploration of the people depicted or the mode of their depiction. Perhaps the competition either needs to find some way to attract a higher calibre of painter, or to expand its repertoire to explore portraiture through more diverse media.

by Hannah Dingwall

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