Mirror, Frith Street Gallery

For the summer exhibition at Frith Street Gallery, artists who use portraiture as a device for storytelling invite us to consider themes of identity and collective memory 

The exhibition

Mirror at Frith Street Gallery in Soho is a well thought out and insightful group show featuring four contemporary artists: Fiona Banner, Victor Man, Margaux Williamson, Mohamed Bourouissa . Revisiting an old form with a new spin, Mirror identifies new ways in which artists are playing, grappling, or flirting with portraiture . Do not however, expect anything like the BP Portrait Prize held each year at the National Gallery, with its photo-realistic portraits of individual subjects. Mirror is as interested in the discontinuities between traditional portraiture and its invocation in contemporary art, as it is in the continuities. 

The history

Portraiture as a genre took off in the late fifteenth century, as an emergent bourgeois class began to have themselves immortalised in paint alongside gods and kings. The portrait was a reflection of the autonomous individual and a mark of distinction, which throughout most of the middle ages had been reserved solely for royalty and noblemen, but in the early modern period began to be used by merchants, bankers, clergy, and artists to gain social status and recognition. 

Today

In an age of digital reproduction, the portrait has a new relationship with identity which is yet to be fully comprehended. Exploring the role of the portrait in the identification of criminals, or the portrait as a representation of the self through narrative, the artists in Mirror playfully pull apart the assumptions of traditional portraiture. Moving away from the portrait as a faithful likeness, they use storytelling and abstraction to present their subjects in strange and diverse ways.