Image: L-R: Anastasia Bukhman, Sonya Boyce and Victoria Siddall with From Someone Else's Fear Fantasy (A Case Of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis by Sonia Boyce © David Parry
Contemporary art by Sonia Boyce and Hew Locke has been acquired as part of the new ‘Collecting the Now’ fund
The National Portrait Gallery has launched a new fund to support the acquisition of contemporary artworks.
The ‘Collecting the Now’ fund has been created to enable the gallery to acquire significant contemporary portraits over the next three years.
Capital for the fund comes in the form a £1m gift from the Bukhman Foundation, and has been used to acquire works by Sonia Boyce and Hew Locke.
The first acquisitions are Boyce’s mixed media self-portrait From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case Of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis.
Boyce described the artwork as a “photomontage that feels like a dream sequence or storyboard. Using the format of the photo booth to capture her/my self-portrait, is a nod to the Surrealists and an artist like Susan Hiller. Racist imagery from popular film and comic-book illustrations are juxtaposed with floral patterns and scenes from ‘nature’ to create a densely layered picture.”
The second acquisition is Locke’s Souvenir 17, which Locke called a “portrait of a British king-in-waiting, weighed down by the burden of history, which I hope can help us to think more about our long and complex relationships to history and nationhood.
“It makes sense for the work to be here at the National Portrait Gallery, having a conversation with the 19th-century portraits around it. It’s almost as if it’s come home.”
Anastasia Bukhman, co-founder of the Bukhman Foundation, said the organisation was “honoured” to support the National Portrait Gallery in expanding its contemporary art collection.
Victoria Siddall, Director of the National Portrait Gallery said the ‘Collecting the Now’ fund will “bring some of the most relevant and exciting contemporary portraits into our Collection”.
