Family features heavily in the shortlist for one of the UK’s most prestigious art awards, with four painters who have captured loved ones asleep, relaxing and making tea.
On Monday, the National Portrait Gallery in London announced the shortlist for the BP Portrait Award 2018 – four works selected from 2,667 entries and 88 countries.
All four artists have been shortlisted for the first time, though three have had works selected for previous BP portrait prize exhibitions.
The exception is first-time entrant Zhu Tongyao, who was born in Jinan, eastern China, and attended the China Central Academy of Fine Arts and the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. It was in Italy that Tongyao painted Simone, the son of neighbours who took care of him during his stay.
Tongyao said the painting recalled his “cherished memory of a happy time spent with the family”.
Miriam Escofet, who was born in Barcelona and moved to the UK as a child, has been shortlisted for a work called An Angel At My Table that shows her elderly mother at her kitchen table with tea crockery.
Escofet, who has been shown in the exhibition four times previously, said she was trying to transmit an idea of the universal mother in her work, someone who “is at the centre of our psyche and emotional world”.
The San Francisco-based artist Felicia Forte has been shortlisted for Time Traveller, Matthew Napping, which shows her boyfriend Matthew DeJong asleep on a sweltering summer’s day in Detroit. It was the culmination of work she made during a 2017 residency at the Red Bull House of Art in the US city.
The fourth contender is Suffolk-based Ania Hobson with A Portrait of Two Female Painters whose painting features the artist and her sister-in-law, Stevie Dix.
The portrait award, regularly targeted by campaigners who object to oil company sponsorship of the arts, is in its 39th year at the National Portrait Gallery and 29th year of sponsorship by BP.
All four works will be part of a wider exhibition at the gallery opening on 14 June. The winner of the £35,000 prize will be announced on 11 June.
