A curation by Natalie Slater, Curator at Singulart - 'I Am What I Am' is a curated selection of painters and mixed-media artists who explore the human face as a site of distortion, intensity, and expressive rupture. These works do not present portraits in the traditional sense, but instead fragment and reconfigure the visage into something at once intimate and unsettling.
Some faces are stripped to near-abstraction, reduced to mark-making and gesture, where only the faintest traces of eyes or mouths remain. Others bear a striking immediacy—staring directly outward—yet their features warp under the weight of asymmetry and manipulation. The palette ranges from luminous, saturated color to muted gray and black tones, yet even in vibrancy the expressions resist comfort, often exuding unease or disquiet.
Together, these works inhabit the space between recognition and estrangement, beauty and distortion. They recall the unsettling distortions of Francis Bacon and the fractured experimentation of Picasso, yet speak in a distinctly contemporary language. Each face becomes less a likeness than a question: what remains of identity once the features are broken apart?
26 Artworks
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