Dianne Kaufman believes in paint. What it can do, physically, washed across or thickly impasted on to canvas, and what it can mean, pushing us beyond the physical into metaphysics and metaphor. Her paintings confound expectation and challenge definition; they are heads without faces, where features shift and vanish under surfaces encrusted with webbed networks of wrinkles like reefs of exotic coral or the exposed lobes of the brain.

If these are portraits they are skewed ones; portraits of no-one and that is the point: being of no one person they are, at the same time, portraits of every person – of what rather than who we are – the universal rather than the particular. They are timeless; like the ancient bodies dredged from peat-bogs they emerge from their dark backgrounds squinting into the light of a world they did not see made and could never have imagined. The paint that simultaneously contains and creates these beings is itself peaty-rich; thickly layered and intricately manipulated it does not merely depict flesh but substitutes for it to give the viewer a visceral experience which is tactile and thought-provoking in equal measure.

The beauty of Kaufman’s images is precisely located in this shift beyond the confines of acceptable appearance. Like the self-portraits of Rembrandt in old age by which they were partly inspired, they fascinate at first by the very ambivalence their strangeness creates, and then by the growing awareness which closer inspection brings of the unconquerable being that sits behind the mask of the surface looking out. Beginning as judges, we may find ourselves being judged, and not necessarily by our own standards, a salutary as well as an unsettling experience.

Kaufman describes her paintings as more about the substance of the face than the likeness, but all the same each one has a clear, often haunting, individual identity that transcends conventional portraiture to touch the fundamental condition of being human; like us these are strangers in strange lands, living behind the masks we all choose to wear sooner than reveal our nakedness to the world. As spectators we look at them, and as we do so they look back: confrontational or questioning, anguished, suspicious or serene, but above all and inescapably one human being to another. These may not be not paintings about beauty, but they are beautiful paintings, full of the fascination of process and becoming, inviting us into a recognition of other dimensions to things we too easily take for granted or at someone else’s valuation. Paint is powerful stuff; in the right hands it can challenge our perceptions of even the most familiar aspects of our lives.

Biography

1994 BA Fine Art, Canterbury

Prizes and awards

2015 First Prize Painting Atelier an der Donau International Symposium, Austria
2011 Honours Painting Prize, Atelier an der Donau Symposium, Pöchlarn, Austria
2007 Finalist Celeste Painting Prize
Exhibitions, galleries and art fairs

2016 Artist of the Day, Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London 21st June
2015 Atelier an der Donau, Austria International Symposium
2015 Thompsons Gallery, Aldeburgh
2014/5 The Other Art Fair, Marylebone, London
2013 Galerie IX, Budapest solo show
2013 Affordable Art New York with Alicia David Contemporary gallery
2013 20/21 Modern British Art, Royal College of Art
2013 JLBaroni, Masons Yard, St James’s From Surface to Structure
2013 Kriterion, foundation Miercurea Ciuc, Romania solo show
2013 Alpha Gallerie, Stubenbastel, Vienna
2012 Rollo Contemporary Gallery, London added work to their collection
2012 The Other Art Fair, Marylebone, London
2010 Keith Chapman Gallery, Fulham, London
2009 Chelsea Old Town Hall gallery, London
2009 Cube Gallery, Bristol, and 20/21 London RCA
2009 Brussels Art Fair with Cube gallery
2009 Brighton Art Fair
2008 Affordable Art Battersea, London
2008 Untitled, Chelsea Old Town Hall, London
2007 Thompson’s Marylebone, London autumn show
2007 London Art Fair with Quantum Contemporary Art
2006 London Art Fair, Islington
2006 Chicago Nova Art Fair, USA
2005 Miami solo show with Ashley Gallery, Philadelphia
2005 Glasgow Art Fair
2005 Emerging Artists Ashley Gallery, Philedelphia
2005 20/21 Gallery, New York, curated by Ashley Gallery
2005 Affordable Art, London and New York
2004 Spectrum Gallery, London Artists of Fame and Promise
2004 Thompson’s gallery, London and Aldeburgh

Prior to this, work shown in various group exhibitions in London, throughout UK, USA, Spain and Austria.