#gender-performance

#gender-performance

Since she graduated in the late 1980s, amid the Aids crisis, Opie has made portraits of her community, friends and family, adopting unflinching realism, saturated colours, and dramatic tonal contrasts from the 16th-century portrait painters. Many of Opie's most famous portraits included in her new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery use these devices deliberately, a declaration that these people deserve, as the title of the show underlines, to be seen.