Image via Complex Original
A portrait sounds like a relatively straightforward thing — a picture of someone — but across time it has proven to be a much more elusive beast. There are appropriated portraits, abstract portraits, portraits of pets, portraits of homes and desks and backpack contents, postmortem portraits, and portraits that are just piles of candy. For any rule you might devise to define a portrait, there is always a bona fide portrait that defies that rule.
At a certain point, portraiture seems to be less of a genre than a blurry constellation of suggested guidelines, or even just something you have to see to recognize. That's when it's time to stop theorizing and start looking at the work of these 25 Awesome Contemporary Portrait Artists.
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Lincoln Schatz
Lincoln Schatz
Genre: Video/New Media
Chicago media artist Lincoln Schatz has pioneerd what he calls "generative" portraiture - a display of video footage and software that continuously re-edits it. The video is shot over a certain period of time: 15 seconds of kids shaking their heads; an hour with LeBron James or George Clooney; a few days with overseas troops or gun control advocates; or forever, in the case of certain works in private collectors homes: the work includes a camera that continuously adds new footage to the loop, creating a highly personal and ever-evolving composite portrait. Video is available on his website.
Website
Eric Daigh
Eric Daigh
Genre: Mixed Media
Michigan artist Eric Daigh has traded art supplies for office supplies, making portraits out of objects like pushpins, duct tape, or Post-It notes. There is certainly a heavy novelty factor for these works, but the craft and technique is undeniable. They make clear references in scale and composition to the portraiture of Chuck Close or Thomas Ruff, while the meticulous mosaic process might resemble a contemporary form of Pointillism. If only Seurat could have used graphics software. Website
Bryan Lewis Saunders
Bryan Lewis Saunders
Genre: Mixed Media
Almost 20 years ago, Bryan Lewis Saunders resolved to make a self-portrait every day for the rest of his life. While such a claim could easily be dismissed as a trite conceptual gesture or publicity stunt, he's kept it up thus far, filling rows of sketchbooks with his own likeness in various media, styles, and states of mind over the years. Not every portrait is available online, but the artist has assembled albums that trace themes of love, anger, or pain over his life, that were made while on drugs, or while hiking the Appalachian trail (where, apparently, he did not see a mirror for some time).
El Mac
El Mac
Genre: Spraypaint
Known for his monumental portraits, graffiti artist El Mac has painted faces on walls, buildings, and canvases all over the world. Grandmothers are a favorite motif - he has painted local grandmothers from Saigon to Monterrey. The L.A. native was even allowed to travel to Cuba to paint one of their grandmothers. He has also done portraits of Mexican migrant workers on multiple continents, an homage to his own proximity to Chicano and Latino cultures, as well as a comment on the contentious issues of immigration and migrant mobility over U.S. borders.
Website
Toyin Odutola
Toyin Odutola
Genre: Drawing
Hailing from Alabama by way of Nigeria, Toyin Odutola The faces are densely shaded, almost completely black, but resist becoming pure shadow with flecks of bright color and sparkling eyes. The openings in the black ink are also what distinguish the face and allow us to see it as a specific portrait rather than a silhouetted type.
Website
Lou Ros
Lou Ros
Genre: Painting
Not to harp on the Frenchness of French people, but when Parisian painter Lou Ros proclaims "I come from the graffiti," it's worth repeating. He did not receive a formal art education, nevertheless, his rich and vibrant works are feats of color and technique. They do conjure street art, as he claims, but are also fully conversant with academicized art forms and historical movements like Expressionism and Surrealism and photography.
Nikki Rosato
Nikki Rosato
Genre: Mixed Media
Nikki Rosato is a young artist from who makes intricate abstract portraits from cut road maps. Within the silhouette of her figure, she removes the land masses from between the roads and highways, leaving a delicate web that remains resembles the human nervous or circulatory system. One work in the series is a three-dimensional self-portrait bust, molded from wire and cut maps of Boston where the artist resides.
Website
Harding Meyer
Harding Meyer
Genre: Painting
Harding Meyer he a Brazilian native who has worked in Germany since the 80's. He translates small photos of unknown catalog and magazine models into oversize, close-up oil portraits. Meyer's mastery of his medium gives them presence and command, not as resurrected personalities but as built objects. They emerge with almost architectural scale (upwards of 8 feet tall) and surface, as the grid overlayed on the image as a copying tool resembles masonry or mosaic under layer upon layer of heavily worked, jewel-toned paint.
Shawn Barber
Shawn Barber
Genre: Painting
San Francisco's Shawn Barber makes skilled and beautiful paintings of people with skillful and beautiful tattoos. This subject matter walks a fine line between homage and originality, but Barber has found a smart compromise, respectfully representing the subject's tattoos in a crisp and realistic manner that gives way to a more loose and free style where there is bare skin or background.
Daniel Kornrumpf
Daniel Kornrumpf
Genre: Embroidery
East-coast based Kornrumph creates beautifully elaborate portraits with dexterous needlework on swaths of canvas or linen. Small stitches in different colors almost resemble paint strokes, contoured and layered on top of one another. Incidentally, Kornrumph is not a half bad painter, either.
Philip Gurrey
Philip Gurrey
Genre: Painting
There's something viscous, almost sticky about Philip Gurrey's style of heavily worked oil painting. He paints not only bodily form but bodily function in his subjects who appear bruised, bloodied, scarred, and swollen - as if they were filled with real bodily fluids too. The distortion also points to a psychological dimension, or a connection between mind and body.
Evan Penny
Evan Penny
Genre: Sculpture
Using futuristic software and super-high-tech 3D printing technologies, Canadian artist Evan Penny turns distorted photos into larger-than-life sculptures. There is a certain degree of humor and absurdity in the cartoonishly stretched, pulled, and pixelated figures, but they are also highly disconcerting in their super-realistic appearance and colossal size. They conjure the terror of a haunted funhouse.
Karen Kilimnik
Karen Kilimnik
Genre: Painting/Installation
Karen Kilimnik can't rightly be called a portraitist, nor necessarily a painter, though portrait painting has persevered throughout the vast media repertoire amassed since the 1980s. In her paintings, she likes to botch and mash-up cultural references, casting past and present celebrities into famous art historical portraits, or painting a famous media image and calling it a self-portrait. Her painting style changes from cartoonish and childlike to deft and sophisticated, between any two images or even on a single canvas. Despite this apparent schizophrenia, the work declares that it would not like to be pinned down or figured out, thank you very much.
Benoit Paille
Benoit Paille
Genre: Photography
I don't know what his mother taught him, but Benoit Paille talks to strangers. As he travels all over the world, he approaches strangers, gets to know them briefly, then takes pictures of them. Contrary to the amateurish or taxonomic aesthetic of many conceptual photography projects, his photos are technically and compositionally flawless, as a textbook might have it, and close-up and careful as if it were a scheduled shoot rather than a man-on-the-street snapshot. In a recent addendum to his "Stranger" series, he invited strangers on the beach to take their own self-portraits using a remote shutter release - giving them control over their appearance at the moment the photo is taken.
Nina Levy
Nina Levy
Genre: Sculpture
Nina Levy lives in Brooklyn with her husband and children - or rather, her husband and children live at home with their mother and a bunch of disembodied heads. Levy sculpts models of fellow artists, critics, dealers, and other "heads" of the art world, casts them in fiberglass, then suspends them from the ceiling at eye level. Generally these are approximately life-size, though she also dabbles in the enormous and distorted (you can commission one in your own likeness on her website). She also takes photographs of her family with sculpted props and costumes, staging bizarre scenes like a baby eating another baby's head, or a totally ripped toddler.
Piet Van Den Boog
Piet Van Den Boog
Genre: Painting
A unique (and potentially hazardous) process involving chemical corrosion and oil paint on metal sheets make Van Den Boog's portraits somehow both abstract and uncanny. Bright colors and organic shapes float around the canvases, but the complex textures and masterful handling of the central figures make them seem to be real beings standing just beyond the picture plane.
Rineke Dijkstra
Rineke Dijkstra
Genre: Photography/video
Rineke Dijkstra's photographs and video works center on people at certain crossroads in their lives, like young soldiers, new mothers, and adolescents. She tends to isolate her subject against a simple backdrop, highlighting their particular features, clothing, and demeanor, to produce a frank and intimate image. While some such close and singular portraits are wont to make claims of conjuring the sitter's deepest inner life, the typifying seriality and minimal aesthetic of Dijkstra's work instead raises issues of the exterior, of the sitter's self-presentation to the camera, and of the viewer's projections into the portrait.
Kehinde Wiley
Kehinde Wiley
Genre: Painting
Wiley has made a name for himself by painting young black men in the style of solemn, regal portraiture that was once the realm of dead white guys. He invites young men he meets around his hometown of New York to pose in the style of an Old Master portrait, then adds a colorful backdrop and a little flair. Recently, Wiley has taken his operation international, painting people from Brazil, India, Israel, and elsewhere in styles inspired by traditional forms from their respective locales.
Ari Marcopoulos
Ari Marcopoulos
Genre: Photography
Dutch-born Ari Marcopoulos has realized the true American dream: being really cool and having famous friends. When he moved to New York in the 80s, he almost immediately fell in with the likes of Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and the Beastie Boys. He's traveled the world as a skate and snowboard, music and fashion photographer, but every picture of a model or some kid smoking pot looks and feels just as sensitive and important as the photos of his own kids.
Maria Forde
Maria Forde
Genre: Drawing
Portraiture can be both fun and educational, as Maria Forde's playful and earnest pencil drawings and zines demonstrate. A series of watercolors of her friends and family offer helpful advice like "please recycle," a series of mugshots trace a history of female pickpockets in her hometown of San Francisco, or interviews with folks from her grandmother's retirement home spread lessons from the older and wiser. Forde's work gives us a friendly reminder to notice the minutiae in everyday life.
Ryan Pickart
Ryan Pickart
Genre: Painting
Mix the veiny lines and goth sensibility of Egon Schiele with the colors and patterns of Gustav Klimt, and you will get Indiana artist Ryan Pickart. His oeuvre comprises a veritable harem of beautiful women painted frontal and centered against brightly patterned backdrops, but don't be fooled by pretty faces and girly dresses. They sit stiff and poker-faced, staring straight out of the canvas, as if to say "try me," or maybe, "come and play with us, Danny, forever..."
Will Robson-Scott
Will Robson-Scott
Genre: Photography
Robson-Scott spends a lot of time hanging out with skaters, graffiti writers, and other such trouble-makers in his native England, and has quite a presence in New York as well. If his photos aren't always candid in the full sense of the word, they are honest and un-embellished portraits of people just living their lives and bringing him (and by extension, us) along.
Karel Funk
Karel Funk
Genre: Painting
A crowded New York City subway car inspired Winnipeg artist Karel Funk's portraits of hooded figures. The figures he depicts never fully show their faces or make eye contact, but his exacting and close-up hyper-realist style gives us a sense of closeness, verging on intimacy, with these anonymous individuals. His work resists the idea that a portrait might tell us something about a person, preferring to make us think about how close you can get to someone without really knowing them at all. His ultra crisp and precise painting technique also tends to hide itself, appearing photographic instead.
Phil Jackson
Phil Jackson
Genre: Photography
A decent eye and quick reflexes are necessary for any skate photographer, but Brooklynite Phil Jackson also brings a sophisticated sense of technique and composition. He captures moving bodies and candid moments in sharp focus and high style, rarely turning to the blurry or loose style that is sometimes common in skate or street photography.
Website
Elizabeth Heyert
Elizabeth Heyert
Genre: Photography
New-York based Elizabeth Heyert has focused on experimental portrait series, which tend to revolve around situations in which her subjects are not conscious of being photographed. These include sleeping people, people gazing at themselves in a two-way mirror, or even people in their caskets as they await their own funeral at a parlor in Harlem. She removes any scenery or context from the background so the figures appear against a blank backdrop, giving her non-traditional pictures the look of more traditional portraiture.