Sydney-based artist Kathrin Longhurst has won the ‘2017 Portia Geach People’s Choice Award’ with Maia at 12 and a half, a portrait of her daughter. The work examines the devastating experience of schoolyard bullying that often results in a complete loss of identity (here manifested by the grey, washed-out colour scheme and parts of the body blending into the background) as well as the feeling of being suffocated by conformity (represented by her hair being wrapped around her neck).
Longhurst’s vision is to portray her sitter as a hero, a strong survivor deliberately painted in a style characteristic of iconic propaganda hero paintings of her youth in communist East Germany. The subject is looking down on the viewer, conveying a sense of strength and untouchability. At the same time Longhurst is using the gentle subdued colour scheme to convey tenderness and to signify loss and pain.
Kathrin Longhurst, Maia at 12 and a half (Maia Longhurst), oil on linen, 100 x 100cm
Longhurst was born in communist East Germany. A classically trained figurative painter, she began attending life drawing classes at the age of fourteen. When she was just fifteen, her family escaped from ‘behind the iron curtain’, relocating to Sweden. This jarring transition from a totalitarian regime to a democracy sparked her passion for exploring the concepts of freedom of speech and expression, concepts that continue to thread through her work today.
Kathrin Longhurst is represented by Nanda Hobbs, Sydney.
