Being There: No. 1 Royal Crescent, Bath, England

The desire to create images of ourselves and other people has been a powerful one for millennia. Portraiture is a fundamental cornerstone of art history and continues to play a key role in contemporary art today.

Thomas Gainsborough lived in Bath from 1760 to 1776. He was one of the most famous artists in Britain. His sitters were wealthy enough to commission him to paint their portrait, which was an important status symbol. The four paintings of the Tugwell family (c. 1763) in this exhibition depict Humphrey Tugwell, a successful merchant, his wife Elizabeth, and their sons, Thomas and William. They are displayed alongside a kaleidoscopic range of contemporary artists' works with contributions from: Michael Armitage, Frank Auerbach, Sarah Ball, Richard Billingham, Glenn Brown, Brian Dawn Chalkley, Kaye Donachie, Paul Graham, Maggi Hambling, David Hockney, Claudette Johnson, Chantal Joffe, Lucy Jones, Joy Labinjo, Melanie Manchot, Celia Paul, Gillian Wearing and Shaqúelle Whyte.

A central thread of the exhibition is family. Since the late 19th century, artists have increasingly portrayed family members and close friends as a way of exploring deep emotion and the psychological complexity of relationships. Paintings such as these are often acts of love. Other artists in the exhibition have portraiture and the human figure at the centre of their work but depict imagined or anonymous individuals whose presence is more ambiguous. This can be as much a reflection of the artist themselves as it is a representation of another.

The title, Being There, takes its name from a watercolour portrait by Lucy Jones of her husband made in 2018. The exhibition includes work in a variety of media including painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and etching. The participating artists come from a variety of social and cultural backgrounds and are also multigenerational with the youngest artist Shaqúelle Whyte aged 24, and the most senior, Frank Auerbach aged 93.

Being There invites you to reflect on the experience of artists as well as their sitters or subjects. What similarities and differences are there between the role of the artist in Gainsborough's time and today? What motivates and inspires artists then and now to create likenesses of others? How have changes in portraiture pointed to a wider shift in art's ability to challenge assumptions and pose important questions in today's more diverse and globalised society?

Ingrid Swenson
August 2024