Creative connections 3

Interesting exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery which invites young people and contemporary artists to respond to pictures in the collection. This year it looked at portraits and biographies of people who  had connections to Camden.

His is the third year of this project. As last year the most interesting thing was seeing the people who had lived and still lived in an area of London. This year included Virginia Woolf, Ed Milliband, Benedict Cumberbatch, Agatha Christie, Alan Bennett and Helena Bonham-Carter.

I didn’t find the students work that interesting this year. It was a series of portraits of the children reacting to a person they had found interesting but it wasn’t always too clear who they’d chosen and I’d have liked more on who and why they had picked them.

However I loved the large picture by the contemporary artist Kate Peters. The exhibition had been divided into five sections with each person being assigned a symbol and each of Peters’ pictures represented one of these groups by using the symbols in an anonymous portrait. I particularly liked a rather surreal one of a person dressed all in white with a table as a skirt!  

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