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BP Portrait Award 2020

The BP Portrait Award  is the most prestigious portrait competition and an annual event aimed at encouraging artists to focus on and develop the theme of portraiture in their work. This year we are celebrating its 41st year at the National Portrait Gallery and its 31st year sponsored by bp. We are pleased we have been able to find a way to share the  BP Portrait Award 2020 with our visitors at home during this uncertain time. All 48 works selected are shown in a virtual gallery space that enables online visitors to view the portraits collectively and explore each individual work in more detail.

The 1,981 entries came from 69 countries and the competition is open to everyone aged 18 and over in recognition of the outstanding and innovative work currently being produced by artists of all ages.

The prize winners and exhibition were selected anonymously by a judging panel chaired by Dr Nicholas Cullinan, Director, National Portrait Gallery. The full panel included Rosie Broadley, Head of Collections Display (Victorian – Contemporary), National Portrait Gallery; Ekow  Eshun, writer and curator; Justine Picardie, writer and Benjamin Sullivan, artist and former BP Portrait Award winner. 

Please click the button to enter into the virtual exhibition of BP Portrait Award 2020. To get a closer look at the artworks and the captions, please double click on the paintings displayed on the wall. In order to navigate the space, double click on the white dots on the floor to move forward or backwards.

To accompany your exploration of the exhibition, we have an audio guide from the Gallery's Chief Curator, Alison Smith. Please open and press play on Alison's recording while you enter the virtual exhibition.

Enjoy!

Sponsored by BP

#BPPortrait

FIRST PRIZE

Jiab Prachakul

Night Talk

Jiab Prachakul was born in in 1979 in Nakhon Phanom, a small town on the Mekong River in northeast Thailand. She studied filmography at Thammasat University before working as a casting director at a Bangkok production company, finding talent for advertising campaigns. In 2006, Prachakul relocated to London where she had the ‘instant realisation’ that she wanted to be an artist after viewing a David Hockney retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery. Entirely self-taught, she moved to Berlin in 2008 and began selling her pictures at a local flea market and set up an online fashion brand, designing merchandise based on her artworks, which she continues to run from her current home in Lyon.

Night Talk portrays Prachakul’s close friends Jeonga Choi, a designer from Korea, and Makoto Sakamoto, a music composer from Japan, who are pictured in a Berlin bar on an autumn evening. The portrait explores notions of individual identity and how perceptions of selfhood can change over time. ‘Our identity is dictated to us from the moment we are born, but as we grow up, identity is what we actually choose to be,’ she says. ‘I do believe that our circle of friends is what makes us who we are. Jeonga and Makoto are like family to me. We are all outsiders, Asian artists living abroad, and their deep friendship has offered me a ground on where I can stand and embrace my own identity.’ 

SECOND PRIZE

Sergey Svetlakov 

Denis: Actor, Juggler and Fashion Model


Sergey Svetlakov was born in 1961 in Kazan, the capital city of what is now the Republic of Tatarstan in the Russian Federation. He graduated from the Kazan Art School, one of the oldest in Russia, before studying set design at the Theatre Academy in St Petersburg where he continues to live and work. His early career was spent designing sets and costumes for operas and stage productions. In the early 1990s, he gave up working in theatre to devote all his energies to his portraiture, nude studies and still life, and he has since exhibited widely across Europe, the US and Japan.

Svetlakov finds many of his sitters on the internet, including Denis, the subject of his entry in the 2020 BP Portrait Award. An aspiring actor, Denis had recently arrived in St Petersburg and placed an advertisement on a social network site offering his services as a model in order to earn extra money. ‘My sitters are usually ordinary people with various types of social backgrounds,’ says Svetlakov.

‘Because Denis is an actor, he is very emotional and his face constantly changes depending on his mood. When I painted him he was desperately searching for work and I found it interesting to convey his intense ambitions and doubts. His face is an explosive fusion of his Ukrainian, Russian, Greek and Tatar genes.’ 

THIRD PRIZE

Michael Youds 

Labour of Love


Born in 1982 in Blackburn, Lancashire, Michael Youds gained a first-class degree in Fine Art from Lancaster University before moving to Edinburgh in 2006. Youds works as a gallery attendant at the National Galleries of Scotland, he is also an award-winning artist in his own right and devotes most of his free time to painting portraits and still lifes at his studio in the city. His work has been selected for exhibitions at the Royal Scottish Academy and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In 2019, he won first prize in the Scottish Portrait Awards for a painting of him and his twin brother David, who is also an artist.

The subject of his entry in the 2020 BP Portrait Award is Tommy Robertson, the owner of an independent music store in Edinburgh. The store has been in business for more than three decades, selling second-hand records, instruments and video games, and Youds wanted to celebrate its eclectic individuality. ‘It’s a very detailed painting,’ he says, ‘I wanted the viewer to feel like they are inside the shop and maybe a little overwhelmed, not knowing what to focus their attention on. Visually, Tommy is engaging and the background is equally interesting. You could probably find something different in the painting each time you looked at it.’ 

The title Labour of Love refers to the UB40 album cover in the bottom left-hand corner of the painting. It also reflects Tommy’s passion for music and the time Youds spent working on the painting.

BP YOUNG ARTIST AWARD

Egbert Modderman

Restless

Born in Heereveen, the Netherlands, Egbert Modderman studied at the Minerva Art Academy and Visual Arts in Groningen. He began painting professionally four years ago after being invited by the city’s Martinikerk (Martin’s Church) to paint a depiction of St Martin. His work has been seen in solo exhibitions in the Netherlands and the USA. The portrait is part of Modderman’s series of large-scale oil paintings portraying characters and stories from the Bible.

Modderman recruited a local brickplayer, Oetze, to pose as his model after he spotted him working in his neighbourhood. After taking hundreds of photographs and making several compositional sketches during the sitting, he spent the next month working in oils to finish the portrait. Modderman’s work places emphasis on the individual’s ‘relatable emotions’ rather than the sacred mysteries that form the cornerstone of Catholic religious imagery

BP TRAVEL AWARD WINNER

Manu Saluja


Each year exhibitors are invited to submit a proposal for the BP Travel Award. The aim of this award is to give an artist the opportunity to experience working in a different environment in Britain or abroad, and on a project related to portraiture.

The winner in 2019 was Manu Saluja, who received £8,000 for her proposal to create portraits at Sikhism’s holiest shrine, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, India. The New York artist had visited the temple as a child on family holidays in India. In her submission, she proposed returning to paint portraits of volunteers working in the temple’s communal kitchen, recalling the ‘beautiful natural light and bursts of colour’ there. 

The video linked below shows Saluja in India as she carries out her project work.

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Night Talk by Jiab Prachakul, 2019 © Jiab Prachakul 

Portrait of Denis: Actor, Juggler and Fashion Model by Sergey Svetlakov, 2019 © Sergey Svetlakov

Labour of Love by Michael Youds, 2019 © Michael Youds 

Restless by Egbert Modderman, 2019 © Egbert Modderman

A Lever Long Enough by Manu Saluja © Manu Saluja