Portraits: 1962 - 2017

We start our journey in the Belgium of 1962. Born some 30 years before, Belgian painter Charles Drybergh was paretic for most of his life. Having experimented with mostly black and white abstract expressionist paintings in his early careers, he destroyed most of these paintings and turned to more figurative art around the time this particular work was created. He was clearly ahead of his time as this work could easily be mistaken for a work from Richard Hambleton's famous Shadow Paintings Series of the 1980s. Drybergh left figurative art for a short visit to Pop Art in the late 60s and early 70s before returning back to black and white paintings from 1973 until the 1980s. His tragic life was cut short in 1990.

Drybergh was awarded the Talenprijs (1959), the Prix Olivetti (1961), the Jonge Belgische Schilderkunst (1961), the Grote Prijs van de Stad Oostende voor Schilderkunst (1961), the Prix de la Critique, Musée des Beaux Arts, Charleroi (1968),  and the Europaprijs voor Schilderkunst van de Stad Oostende (1969 and 1973). 

We stay with Jean-Michel Basquiat who by now has transitioned from street artist to gallery artist. Having had his first solo show with Emilio Mazzoli in Modena, Italy in May 1981, Basquiat was about to be propelled to the echelons of art world legend. His phenomenal rise to art world darling started in December 1981, when René Ricard published "The Radiant Child" in Artforum magazine saying:

"If Cy Twombly and Jean Dubuffet had a baby and gave it up for adoption, it would be Jean-Michel."

This work, Untitled (1981) actually once belonged to René Ricard and quite possibly was one of the reasons he wrote the now infamous article about Jean-Michel.

On our next stop, we visit Japan in 1989, a time in which Japan experienced an immense real estate bubble and dominated the global art market. At their peak, prices in central Tokyo were such that the Tokyo Imperial Palace grounds were estimated to be worth more than all the land in the entire state of California.

Let's go back to the beginning of our journey in the 1960s though. Two years after Charles Drybergh produced Sans Titre, Jiro Takamatsu was about to become one of the most influential and important artists in Japan and began his signature Shadow Paintings series, which he continued until the end of his life.
He boasts an impressive career that includes representing Japan at the Venice Biennale (1968), the Paris Biennial (1969), the Sao Paulo Biennial (1973) and Documenta 6 (1977). 
Shadow No. 1430 was started in 1989 and completed by Jiro Takamatsu in 1997.

Let's head back over to the east cost and into the new millenium. 

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1927, Alex Katz achieved great public prominence in the 1980s. His signature paintings are about half landscapes and half portraits, making him an obvious choice for this show. Defined by their flatness of colour and form and their seemingly emotional detachment, his large paintings are now seen as precursors to Pop Art. His work has been the subject of more than 200 solo exhibitions and nearly 500 group shows. He has been honoured with retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Brooklyn Museum, the Jewish Museum, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, the Colby College Museum of Art, the Staatliche Kunsthalle, the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Málaga and the Saatchi Gallery. He is also set to have an upcoming retrospective at the Guggenheim New York.

His work is in the collections of over 100 public institutions including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian Institution, the Tate Gallery and the Centre Georges Pompidou.

Created in 2004, Martha exhibits all of Katz's trademarks: large scale, bold simplicity, heightened colours and a seemingly emotional detachment.

We stay in the genre of photography but fly back to the United States where we observe one of its most famous stars of the 20th century: Marilyn Monroe.

Rising to fame in the early 50s and 60s, she continues to be a major popular culture icon more than 50 years after her untimely death. 

Shortly before passing away at only 36 years old, portrait and fashion photographer Bert Stern

shot with Marilyn for Vogue, producing a set of photographs that would become famous as "The Last Sitting".

In our next stop, China meets Europe. 

Chinese performance artist and photographer Li Wei (born 1970) takes on the laguna of Venice, Italy. Using mirrors, metal wires, scaffolding and acrobatics rather than computer montages, he creates illusions of sometimes dangerous reality.

His work has been shown in the Katonah Museum of Art, United States (2012), the Beijing Times Art Museum, China (2011), the Daegu Photo Biennale 2010 in Korea (2010), the Palazzo Reale Museum, Milan (2009), the Olympic Museum, Switzerland (2008), the Criterion Gallery, Australia (2007), the Toulouse Art Museum, France (2006), the Ox Warehouse, Macau (2005), the MMAC exhibition, Japan (2004), the Prague Biennial in Czech Republic (2003), the Beijing Red Square, Beijing (2002), the Hong Kong Arts Center, Hong Kong (2001), the Performance Art Festival, Beijing (2000).

2016 takes us to the exciting world of Javier Calleja. Having apprenticed under the tutelage of Yoshitomo Nara, his big eyed characters clearly draw influences from Pop, Surrealism, Minimalism, Street Art and Japanese Cartoon and Manga culture.

Javier has previously expressed a fondness for the work of René Magritte and reinterprets surrealist techniques through contemporary portraiture.

Japanese aesthetics have developed a strong attachment to "big eyes" and Javier Calleja cleverly reimports these into this works, thus connecting Asia to Europe and showing us all what a global world the art circus has become.