BP Portrait Award faces our current affairs

My Account
Logout

Create an Evening Standard Account

Use your social network

Save time by using your existing account to sign in to Evening Standard

We'll never share your information or post anything to your account without your permission

Welcome! Sign in here

Use your social network

Save time by using your existing account to sign in to Evening Standard

We'll never share your information or post anything to your account without your permission

Forgot your password ?

Registration

* indicates fields that are mandatory

Email *

Password *

Confirm Password *

First name *

Surname *

Postcode *

Country *

Mobile phone number

Username *

Gender *

Year of birth *

When you sign up...

You will have access to all our online competitions, discounted offers and can post comments on our site.

You will also receive The Weekender newsletter sent every Thursday - it’s full of fantastic offers and ideas for the weekend. You can update your email preferences in your account page when you log in.

Other newsletters and emails

Homes & Property Newsletter - Yes I want to receive the weekly email with all the latest news on property in the capital

Occasionally we would also like to send you relevant emails detailing specific offers either from ourselves or carefully selected partners. If you would prefer not to receive these then please tick the appropriate boxes below. We will never pass on your details.

I do not want to receive additional offers and information from the Evening Standard

I do not want to receive additional offers and information sent by Evening Standard on behalf of carefully selected partners

Terms and Conditions

* I have read, understood and agree to be bound by the terms and conditions of Evening Standard

Registration

Mail Sent for Registration Confirmation.

A confirmation email has been sent. Please activate your account by clicking on the activation link sent in your mail box.

They are right at the back of the gallery and they are the smallest works in it — appropriate for art about an oppressed minority in a remote place — but the most important exhibits here are the portraits of ethnic Muslim Uighur from the Chinese province of Xinjiang by Emmanouil Bitsakis. The riots in that region this week, which involved fighting between the Uighur and dominant Han Chinese and left more than a hundred dead, make Bitsakis’s portraits timely and newsworthy — but these are also stunning paintings in their own right, deserving winners of the 2008 BP travel award.

Not much more than a dozen centimetres square, the images have a powerful mood of loss and fortitude with their flattened perspective, sharply drawn brooding faces, which recall Dürer and Memling, and compressed backgrounds featuring local ornament and Communist architecture. A solo show beckons.

The rest of this exhibition — 62 pictures selected from 1,900 entries, is a case study in how good art doesn’t always have to push boundaries. It’s old-fashioned, un-experimental, sometimes stickily sentimental. Your boring uncles and aunts from Surrey — the ones who hate contemporary art — are going to love it.

There’s some damn fine painting here. The complex characters and fleeting moods of football supporters, hip-hop artists, consultant paediatricians and fishermen, plus a predictable flood of wrinkly grannies and innocent-eyed sons and daughters are skilfully conveyed by an international array of little-known artists in popular contemporary styles, ranging from the vigorous spatula approach to the naïve Sunday painter to the meticulously photographic. The overall winner, 44-year-old Peter Monkman has depicted his daughter, Anna, looking self-conscious on the cusp of adolescence.

There are far too many photorealist paintings, but looking at ones like Tom by the second-prize winner Michael Gaskell, which took him four years to paint in the tricky medium of egg tempera, you may find yourself pondering yet again one of the great unanswerables in art that portraiture raises: what is the difference between a photograph and a painting? Perhaps one day mankind will discover the answer, in the meantime, realism is always amazing, but portrait painting as a genre is about more than virtuosity. It’s real subject is intimacy.

Until 20 September. Information: 020 7306 0055; www.npg.org.uk

BP Portrait Award
National Portrait Gallery
WC2