FACE TO FACE
17.00 - 17.45, 17 JUNE 2020
Join us on Wednesday, June 17th at 5 pm for a panel discussion in collaboration with Christie's, currently holding the online auction, Face Time: people in art through the ages. This panel discussion, moderated by London Art Week participant Matthew Reeves, will seek to explore our fascination with portraits and how their meaning to the viewer and collector has changed over the centuries.
Looking into the eyes of another human face fixed in stone, paper, or canvas starts to part the curtains of history a history loaded with the complexities of human contact, shared memory, and asymmetrical relations of power.
Scrutiny over the issue of our human identity has mounted in recent weeks, challenging the faces of history that we have traditionally chosen to lionise. Portraiture arguably has a greater role in this process than any other art form, uniquely bound in a three-way conversation about identity that exists between artist, sitter and viewer.
Questions over what draws us to the human face, what it can tell us, and how we should interpret historical portraits today, have never been more relevant. An Van Camp (Ashmolean Museum), Andreas Pampoulides (Lullo Pampoulides), Olivia Ghosh (Christie's) and Matthew Reeves (Sam Fogg) will consider together the history of portraiture and its collecting at a moment in time that calls for the renewed scrutiny of that same history.
Moderator: Matthew Reeves, Sam Fogg London, London Art Week Participant
Matthew has worked in the art world for 15 years, starting out as a journalist, critic, and curator of contemporary art, before specialising in medieval art during his studies at the Courtauld Institute in London. He is a director at Sam Fogg, the world's leading dealer in the art of the European Middle Ages, and over the last 7 years has managed the gallery's busy program of exhibitions and publications, both at its Mayfair home and through a series of biennial travelling shows mounted in collaboration with Old Master and contemporary galleries in New York. His own area of research focuses on the patronage of the Valois courts in late-medieval France.
An Van Camp, Christopher Brown Assistant Keeper of Northern European Art, Ashmolean Museum
An is the curator responsible for Northern European Art at the Ashmolean in Oxford and looks after the museum's Dutch, Flemish and German prints, drawings and paintings and joined the museum in 2015 after working in the British Museum from 2006. Here she co-curated a major international exhibition in 2015 on metalpoint drawings, 'Drawing in Silver and Gold', shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the British Museum in London. More recently, she has collaborated with Museum De Lakenhal (Leiden, The Netherlands) on a major exhibition focusing on Rembrandt as a young artist. "Young Rembrandt" opened at the Ashmolean in February 2020 (before being closed during lockdown). Before joining The British Museum An studied History, Archaeology, Art History & Museum Studies at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium) and at University College London.
Olivia Ghosh, Specialist, Old Masters Group, Christie's London
After studying modern languages at Cambridge, Olivia went on to do a masters at the Courtauld focusing on British art of the 18th Century. She was then the Anne Christopherson Fellow in the Department of Prints and Drawings at the British Museum in London, before joining Christie's as a graduate trainee in 2017. She has been a member of the Old Master Paintings Department since October 2018 and has also been an auctioneer since January 2019.
Andreas Pampoulides, Lullo • Pampoulides, London Art Week Participant
Andreas's formal education began with an undergraduate degree in Classics and a year of practical training in sculpture at art school. In 1999 he undertook an MPhil in early European art history and began his career at Christie's London in the European sculpture department. He later became Head of the Department and remained there for 13 years before serving three years as a director in the Coll & Cortes/ Colnaghi galleries, where he played a key role in the discovery, acquisition, research and selling of a number of significant artworks that now reside in both important private art collections, and in world-class museums. In 2016 he established Lullo • Pampoulides with his long-time friend, Andrea Lullo with the aim to reinvigorate the old masters market by offering newly discovered works that are presented in a fresh and modern manner and they have sold numerous works to public institutions around the world.