Tori Beeche
Reflective Nostalgia
“This body of work utilises the technical ideas of Expressionism, of forming an image through a painterly process. Using the traditional compositional conventions of portraiture; a framework that links both, “seventeenth century portrait painting and those eponymous snapshots that record friends, family or associates”.”
Drawing on these conventions seeks to reference both personal and shared histories capturing notions of fashion and style that refer to another time. The re-presentation of old photographs through painting offers a means to explore notions of ‘restorative’ and ‘reflective nostalgia’.1
This project sits within the broader context of concerns first explored by the Expressionist movement at the turn of the 20th Century of encoding a ‘subjective reality’; revisited again by the new European painters in the 1980s and 1990s. Echoing ideas explored by contemporary painters such as Luc Tuymans, Marlene Dumas and Wilhelm Sasnal who all engage with photography while, “returning to painting; to painting history; to thinking about painting and its transformation of the modernist other, the photograph”.2
- Olowska, Paulina, Bovier, Lionel, Bujnowska, Anna, Szymczyk, Adam, Verwoert, Jan, and Kunsthalle Basel. Paulina Olowska. Zurich: JRP/Ringier, 2013. Print. P.66
- Willing, Victor, and Bradley, Fiona. Victor Willing. “Imaginary Portraits” by Lynne Cooke London: Aug, 2000.
