Review: Royal Society of Portrait Painters - Annual Exhibition 2019
One of the overarching characteristics of the 2019 Annual Exhibition of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters is that ALL works selected for exhibition from the Open Entry are chosen by members of the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. There are no administrators, sponsors, gallerists, art critics or other such éminence grise who get a say on what gets hung.
Unlike other portrait exhibitions, this exhibition is rigorously selected by professional portrait painters who themselves have been elected by their peers to their Society.I was really looking forward to this exhibition after last year when I raved about the changes - see Review: Royal Society of Portrait Painters Annual Exhibition - Unstuffed!
However I came away feeling somewhat deflated this year - hence the gap before writing this review. I guess it was because I had high hopes it would continue in the same vein as last year - and yet I felt that the "stuffed shirts" had returned and were a little too prominent. It felt a bit like it had backtracked to previous exhibitions about which I've been a tad critical in the past.
Below I discuss some of the themes of the exhibition for me
- Stuffed Shirts versus Skin
- The Hang - juxtapositions and themes
- Exhibit to Market - why this exhibition is emphatically a marketing exercise re. commissions
- Paintings I liked - a very small selection of the paintings I liked in the exhibition.
