#portraiture

#portraiture

Consider Hans Holbein the Younger's portrait of Henry VIII's fourth wife, Anne of Cleves: an enigmatic look, cast from beneath heavy-lidded eyes; a long nose, the soft breath from which is almost felt; a red velvet gown richly adorned with gold and pearls, set against a blue background made more vivid by its recent restoration. Serving as the cover image for Elizabeth Goldring's biography, it is a painting that conveys much of her subject's continuing

"I have been reading your book The Lonely City: The Art of Being Alone and I wanted to write and say how very good it is," "I discovered Henry Darger's work about 15 years ago. I am so interested in how you write about him and [Edward] Hopper, [Andy] Warhol and [David] Wojnarowicz."

Gerwyn Davies treats the photographic portrait as a stage for disappearance in his ongoing body of work. The Sydney-based artist engineers elaborately costumed selves that gleam under studio lighting, swell into sculptural proportions, and refuse to reveal a face. What appears at first to be hypervisibility, sequins, vinyl, and candy-colored textiles, becomes a visual barricade. The body inside the costume is present, centered, and performing.

Color becomes a voice in the 2025 Chromatic Awards, where 21 standout photographs showcase just how powerfully it can speak. This year's selections burst with vivid palettes, nuanced tones, and daring artistic choices that define the competition's reputation as a premier stage for color‑driven photography. More than a contest, the Chromatic Awards exists to elevate storytellers who see the world through a chromatic lens, resulting in winners that feel imaginative, emotional, and deeply personal.

Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller, and White House advisorJames Blair. The portraits included close-ups that heightened every pore and fine line (and lip injection site), and shots that rendered these political figures comically tiny, swallowed up by their backdrops.

Our community was made up of wonderful people, and she knew the value and impact a portrait could have on someone's feelings of pride and belonging,

From thousands of colorful hair beads, Felandus Thames conjures vibrant patterns and portraits. He takes historical photographs as a starting point, focusing especially on Black and Indigenous figures whose stories have largely been underrepresented in American historical narrative. These include dancer and choreographer Alvin Ailey and Amos Haskins, a 19th-century Wampanoag man who became a master mariner—one of the few Indigenous people to do so.

Fashion loves a full circle moment, and with Sarah Burton's arrival at Givenchy, one closes with inevitability. For more than two decades - over half her life - Burton devoted her work to Alexander McQueen, the house that shaped her hand and honed her heart. McQueen himself, of course, once held the keys to Givenchy's ateliers in the 1990s, a brilliant tenure that burned bright and fast.

My faces are a mixture of the past and the present. I cannot paint the horrors of the ongoing genocides of our times directly, but their shadows did affect the mood under which these faces were made. Portraiture deals with likeness and the recognition of people known. Faces deal with the nameless. They include those dehumanised, like fugitives, branded as aliens.

The wild expressiveness of her most famous photographs runs deeply through the pieces in Sanctum Sanctorum, named after the concept of a sacred room or inner chamber. Couples are shown nude and sexually entangled with one another; solo women sit glamorously in bed covered in fine jewellery; a female impersonator curls up on a striped mattress, almost naked except for a coiffed blonde wig and delicate heels.

A KALTBLUT exclusive editorial. Photography and styling by Stefano Sensolo. The model is Ines Domene. All fashion items are from the personal archive.

Stephen Fishwick paints the way some people breathewith instinct, rhythm, and an unspoken urgency to translate feeling into form. His work is born from movement rather than deliberation, a synthesis of music, color, and gesture that feels more like performance than process. What he captures is not a single moment, but the sensation of many moments collidingthe way sound becomes light, and emotion becomes visible.

The portraits in the exhibition, inspired by two sculptural works by Camille Claudel and Auguste Rodin, serve as a conceptual springboard to also frame the group of treescapes on view. Party utilizes the symbolism and mythological references present in these sculptures to confront the inevitability of aging and death, two themes that have long been central to his artistic exploration. Known for his unique use of soft pastel, the artist has become a master of the medium, employing the pigment's versatility, immediacy and saturated color.

The new film Moss & Freud opens with Kate Moss (Ellie Bamber) hurtling down the motorway, cigarette in hand, blond hair whipped back, redoing her lipstick in the rear-view mirror like a Hitchcockian anti-heroine. When sirens peal behind her and the police pass, Moss cackles. This sequence establishes the film's fixation as being on the model and unlikely, one-time muse of Lucian Freud (here Derek Jacobi), rather than on the artist. Sadly, it has little to say about either subject-or Freud's self-proclaimed search for "truth"

Across a range of genres, from portraits to landscapes to wildlife, the work of 40 contemporary photographers features in a brand new book. Exposure: Contemporary Photographers in Australia and New Zealand, authored by Amber Creswell-Bell, highlights an array of practices that explore fashion, Indigenous culture, nature, and more. Published by Thames & Hudson Australia, Exposure "captures the essence of modern photography, showcasing bold perspectives, striking landscapes, and intimate portraits that reflect the region's cultural richness and natural beauty," says a statement.

She wrote it down and kept returning to it, consumed by the ideas it evoked of mapping feelings and place, and the correlation between geography and experience - a kind of emotional cartography. At the same time, she'd been thinking about psychogeography and the practice of exploring our environments guided solely by subjective impulses and the desire to generate chance encounters and uncover hidden histories and memories.

"In my mind, I always try to start from scratch in order to avoid lapsing into a completely pre-established harmony by creating something based on a prior intention or plan," he has said. "Surprise is a necessity when making art. I welcome unforeseen accidents that transcend my imagination and let myself go with the flow. Mistakes are also welcome: failure breeds success."

Nathaniel Mary Quinn has never shied away from confronting the most difficult corners of the human condition. With ECHOES FROM COPELAND, his fifth solo exhibition with Gagosian, the acclaimed American artist channels fear, grief, and redemption into a deeply visceral body of work. The exhibition, currently on view at Gagosian's West 24th Street gallery through October 25, draws inspiration from literature and figurative abstraction to create an emotional terrain as fractured as it is full of possibility.

In the hundred-year history of The New Yorker, photography has appeared on the cover exactly twice. For the magazine's seventy-fifth anniversary, in 2000, the dog-loving portraitist William Wegman dressed up one of his Weimaraners as Eustace Tilley, our dandyish mascot, originally drawn by Rea Irvin. (The butterfly that canine Eustace studies through his monocle also has a dog's head.) But no human had broken the barrier until last month, when Cindy Sherman's image of herself as Eustace covered a special issue on the culture industry.

The Schoelkopf Gallery has unveiled a landmark exhibition that brings to light a body of work unseen for nearly five decades. Jamie Wyeth: Portraits of Andy Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev presents the artist's strikingly intimate studies of two cultural giants of the 20th century. Opening September 12 and running through October 17, 2025, the show revisits Wyeth's silken realism and offers a rare glimpse into his artistic dialogue with Pop Art's enfant terrible Andy Warhol and ballet's electrifying star Rudolf Nureyev.

The Los Angeles-based artist Edward Cushenberry uses the format of the polaroid to explore the people and places that make him who he is. But, he doesn't do so in the 'traditional' way - he draws them. Choosing coloured pencils and inks over photography, Edward's pieces are still framed and captured like photo. Figures - often loosely based on Edwards friends - are candid and seemingly capture in motion, these images are then made dynamic and animated with the slivers of dialogue offered as hand-drawn captions.

Born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Georges attended St. John's University in New York, where he specialized in photography and directing. His work spans personal projects as well as fashion and editorial assignments that reflect a sensitivity to the people, places, and stories he encounters. Georges is interested in capturing moments of quiet intensity, exploring the passage of time, and fleeting emotions.

Philip I of Castile made his expectations for the painter perfectly clear: His daughters Eleanor and Isabella, positioned to the left and right of his son Charles, were not to appear pale or sickly. Instead, they were to embody vibrant life rosy-cheeked, dressed in splendid garments, and as beautiful as can be. The painting, completed in 1502, was then replicated multiple times

Nadav Kander is a Kentish Town-based photographer who is well known for his moody, atmospheric photographs. Scratch that, he's the man behind some of my most beloved photographs of artists, such as David Lynch, Adam Pearson, Benicio Del Toro and other magnetic subjects, in which his photographic eye for light and darkness pulls powerful auras from the celebrity faces we have seen thousands of times.