Critchlow's portraits of Black women transform Western portraiture and conflate kitsch with traditionOnly three years after her graduation from the Royal Drawing School in London, British painter Somaya Critchlow (born 1993) has already soared to worldwide acclaim for her figurative portraits of women that explore nuances of race, sexuality and culture. After learning art history through a white, Western lens and being encouraged to only paint white figures, Critchlow turned to self-portraiture as a way of reclaiming the craft. She then began to paint other women of color, ranging in scale from intimate miniatures to life-sized illustrations, each representing their self-possessed subjects with evocative brushstrokes in rich shades of bronze and puce. They subvert conventional representations of Black women throughout art history even as Critchlow draws upon traditional techniques of thinned oils and watercolors. Critchlow's visual lexicon necessarily draws from the distinctions of race and class that form our contemporary visual landscape. This is the first monograph on her work.
Critchlow's portraits of Black women transform Western portraiture and conflate kitsch with traditionSomaya Critchlow's canvases and sketchbooks log an ongoing process of world building. The artist fashions these realms by drawing upon her expansive knowledge of picture-making traditions ranging from the Renaissance to the Rococo. In charting the ever-expanding dimensions of this female dominated universe, Critchlow casually disarms the distinctions that inform concepts of high and low culture by uncovering the ways in which class and racial difference are routinely conflated. The voluptuous, self-possessed women who explore Critchlow's fantasy landscapes and pensively occupy domestic interiors or otherwise blank pages owe as much to the aesthetics of Love and Hip Hop as they do to Peter Paul Rubens, and thus prompt the viewer to consider the disparate ways in which we esteem these forms of culture--and the women they feature.
Critchlow's portraits of Black women transform Western portraiture and conflate kitsch with traditionSomaya Critchlow's canvases and sketchbooks log an ongoing process of world building. The artist fashions these realms by drawing upon her expansive knowledge of picture-making traditions ranging from the Renaissance to the Rococo. In charting the ever-expanding dimensions of this female dominated universe, Critchlow casually disarms the distinctio