Laura Guokė's works at the BP Portrait Award 2017, National Portrait Gallery
Selected from 2,557 entries by artists from 80 countries around the world, the BP Portrait Award 2016 represents the very best in contemporary portrait painting. From parents to poseurs, figurative nudes to famous faces and expressive sketches to piercing photo-realism, the variety and vitality in the exhibition continues to make it an unmissable highlight of the annual art calendar.
The BP Travel Award 2016 was won by Lithuanian artist Laura Guokė for her proposal to travel to refugee camps in Ritsona, Greece. On her travels, Guokė took sketches, photographs and film in order to create large-format portraits of the most vulnerable refugees from Syria and the volunteers helping them. Her twin portraits - Monica and Rima and Muhammed Ahmed - show a female refugee and her child, and a female volunteer at the camp. The pair were chosen because of their very different backgrounds but very similar ages. Whilst Rima escaped Aleppo to head to the camp, Monica was there on a break from a business degree. Her aim was to show migrants as people with names, faces and individual stories, using her work to convey personal themes which may otherwise be difficult to put into words. The resulting work is being displayed in the BP Portrait Award 2017 exhibition.
Visit the exhibition for free at the National Portrait Gallery, St Martin’s Place, London, WC2H 0HE
More information - http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/bp-portrait-award-2017/exhibition/
