Tag: contemporary portraiture

Louise Renée creates heartfelt soft pastel paintings inspired by family, memories, and the people and animals she holds dear. From commemorating her beloved dog Buddy to revisiting her father's experiences as an RAF pilot during the Second World War, her portraits preserve personal stories through colour, expression, and emotion.

Margret Pinger creates textured portraits that explore the emotions, experiences, and individual stories behind the human face. Working with oil and acrylic, she paints entirely with her fingers, building layered backgrounds that merge with expressive portraits of women.

Maureen Daniel creates large-scale portraits that challenge conventional ideas of female beauty and representation. Working primarily in acrylic and oil, she paints women as they are, free from expectations of perfection, flattery, or stereotypical elegance.

Joanna Pilarczyk creates colourful figurative paintings that combine expressive portraits, bold geometric patterns, and lush greenery. Influenced by nature, street art, animation, and graphic design, she builds vibrant compositions that explore identity, intimacy, relationships, and acceptance.

Sarah Rutherford is a British painter who returned to her artistic practice after stepping away from painting to pursue a career in marketing. Working primarily in oils, she creates portraits and still lifes that look beyond surface appearances to explore character, emotion, and the stories objects carry.

Cristina Chirilă creates layered portraits that explore the complex emotions, memories, and contradictions beneath the surface of a recognisable face. Working across painting, photography, and installation, she uses fragmentation, blurring, and overpainting to challenge how we see and understand identity.

Discover the Portraits Virtual Exhibition by Women in Arts Network, featuring an inspiring collection of women artists from around the world. Through painting, photography, textiles, sculpture, and mixed media, these selected works explore identity, memory, emotion, culture, and human connection, revealing how portraiture continues to evolve as one of art's most powerful forms of storytelling.

For more than two decades, Gala Gilan has developed a contemporary figurative painting practice that combines technical realism with emotional depth, quiet atmosphere, and thoughtful observation. Working primarily in oil, she uses light not simply to define form but to shape mood, memory, and the subtle emotional presence within each portrait. Rather than creating exact likenesses, Gala's paintings leave space for mystery, inviting viewers to bring their own experiences and interpretations into every work. Inspired by everyday moments, personal relationships, and the enduring language of realism, she explores how portraiture can…

Carola Helwing creates paintings that carry the memory of movement, shaped by her background in dance and deep understanding of the human body. Beginning with photographs of dancers, she transforms gesture into something more internal, capturing not just how movement looks, but how it feels from within. Her figures exist in a delicate balance between strength and fragility, where tension, control, and release unfold quietly across the canvas. Colour plays a central role, sometimes soft and atmospheric, other times bold and vivid, including pop tones that bring her work into a…

Ligia Fascioni creates layered portraits that merge photorealism with hand-drawn floral and figurative elements over real urban textures. Using photographs of the Berlin Wall and torn street posters, she builds faces on surfaces rich with history and meaning. Each piece reflects the idea that identity is formed through layers—cultural, emotional, and historical. With a background in engineering and design, her work is both structured and deeply expressive. Her compositions transform decay into beauty, turning overlooked materials into powerful foundations. The result is art that invites viewers to look closer and uncover…