Excerpts below taken from The New Face of Portrait Painting By Dushku Petrovich. - New York Times Style Magazine
“For centuries, of course, portrait painting was art. But by the second half of the 20th century, it had almost disappeared. By this time, critics routinely announced the death of painting with every new technological and aesthetic innovation. First there was the proliferation of photography, then the ready-made. Then there was the internet, and social media, whose rise seemed to render the medium of painting — not to mention portraiture — completely irrelevant: Why paint someone’s picture in the age of the selfie? Most painters responded by getting weirder, more abstract, more experimental; representational figurative art was anachronistic, inert, crusty — a form of vanity exclusive to the rich. And yet portraiture — in the classic, realist sense — has become increasingly essential (and visible) in the last few years.”
“We live in a time in which reality is almost daily warped in ways that were unimaginable even 18 months ago. We have swiftly entered an era where the very notion of truth, or facts, is considered fungible. As we reassess the various power structures that landed us here, it is stabilizing and reassuring to look at the work of an artist who is clearly in control of her craft, who is able to depict a reality that is material and grounded in recognition — of seeing, in the Facebook age, a painting that looks like who it is meant to.”
“If the news of the world feels every day more like a pulpy political thriller with an unhinged plotline, painters have responded by grounding their work in observable, human reality.”
