Double Take: Double Portraits from the Collection (Part Two)
27 May, 2014 - 13 July, 2014
Main Galleries
Double portraits are as familiar to us as images of the Virgin and Child at Christmas, social media snaps of couples, friends, family or the formal wedding portrait photograph. Despite the universality of this style of portraiture, there can be powerful forces at work in portraits where more than one figure is represented. Double portraits can often express more dimensions of psychological insight and artistic technique than the single portrait, and evoke more intense responses in the viewer.
The double portrait can be an opportunity for the artist to explore the subtleties of a relationship between two people. Double portraits can also be used to examine two sides of a single personality. Artists often make double images of themselves, to release or resolve some internal conflict, or to reveal different aspects of their inner selves to the viewer. Literary themes such as the doppelganger or physical double also make their way into double portraiture.
New Zealand artists have approached the double portrait in an amazing variety of ways, from tongue-in-cheek to serious and searching. Richard Lewer’s Our Best Wasn’t Good Enough (2009) is a hilariously tragi-comic depiction of a pair of strapping yet childlike Rugby League players, commiserating with each other after losing a game. Glenn Jowitt’s marvellous photographic portrait of Philip Clairmont (1983) captures the expressionist painter’s unusual good looks and rare intensity while posed in front of one of his own wildly-distorted self-portrait images.
Mary McIntyre has returned again and again to the double portrait throughout her long career as one of New Zealand’s most celebrated portrait painters, and the Collection is especially rich in double portraits by this senior practitioner in the field. In contemporary art practice double portrait images are as current as ever. Williams and Jowsey’s enigmatic diptych The Correction (2009) was the winner of the Wallace Arts Trust Paramount Award in the 2009 Wallace Art Awards, while Jamie Chapman’s cinematic oil, Standard Ratio, was completed and acquired by the Trust in 2013.