Friendship, love, inspiration and rivalry are operating themes in an exhibition at Pallant Home Gallery that charts how artists have portrayed each other. Spanning portray, sculpture, set up, pictures, drawing and printmaking, Seeing Every Different: Portraits of Artists contains depictions of greater than 130 artists by no less than 80 totally different palms, all working in Britain from the early twentieth century till now.
“There’s a lot soul-searching, whether or not within the arts or in society at massive in the intervening time, and so it felt like a great time to replicate on individuality, id, collaboration and image-making, however from that particular viewpoint of artists taking a look at different artists,” says Pallant Home Gallery’s chief curator, Melanie Vandenbrouck. “It’s fascinating to discover how they navigate that sitter/artist relationship,” she says. “I feel artists have a look at one another with a distinct gaze, whether or not this be about admiration, emulation, rivalry, or one thing extra profound, like deep friendship or love.”
Organized chronologically, the exhibition explores creative circles, artwork college friends and diverse different relationships, from the Bloomsbury Group to the British Black Arts Motion. A number of portraits of Francis Bacon, together with these by Lucian Freud and Maggi Hambling, replicate the pull he exerted on his contemporaries, whereas Johnnie Shand Kydd’s candid images of the Younger British Artists helped to cement their collective id because the embodiment of Cool Britannia. In Vernet’s Studio (1994), Lubaina Himid acknowledges her creative heroes previous and current with life-sized, cut-out figures of Frida Kahlo, Bridget Riley, Claudette Johnson and Maud Sulter.
Lengthy-term friendships have been significantly rewarding to analysis, Vandenbrouck says, highlighting Ishbel Myerscough and Chantal Joffe, whose histories have been entwined since they met at Glasgow Faculty of Artwork within the Eighties. A brand new double portrait made for the present is the end result of a long time of mutual inspiration, channelling “that childlike innocence of their first days collectively”.
Uglier motives are right here too, with Cedric Morris’s 1931 portrait of Barbara Hepworth bearing out Peggy Guggenheim’s commentary that Morris’s portraits have been “in most half almost caricatures, all of them on the disagreeable aspect”. John Bratby’s 1954 portrait of his then spouse Jean Cooke, bare and cowed behind a pile of home junk, virtually broadcasts his marital abuse; her portrait of him from the identical 12 months subtly undermines him as comfortably home, even bourgeois.
The present encompasses a vital proportion of ladies artists, difficult their historic under-representation. “We hung out monitoring down explicit works, like a uncommon portrait of Matthew Smith by Vera Cuningham,” Vandenbrouck says. The 2 have been lovers within the Nineteen Twenties. “It says one thing about gender dynamics that portraits of Cuningham by Smith are, in contrast, simple to seek out.”
• Seeing Every Different: Portraits of Artists, Pallant Home Gallery, Chichester, 17 Could-2 November
