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01st September 2009

Uncanny Likeness exhibition displays Old Member’s art

This month the OVADA gallery, Oxford, exhibited the work of Emma Cousin (2004, Fine Art) alongside Olivia Franklin, Adam J Maynard, Gideon Pain and Peter Monkman: this year’s winner of the BP National Portrait Award.

Entitled Uncanny Likeness, the exhibition explored new perspectives on contemporary portraiture and addressed what it means today through different mediums: in paint and also in animation.

Emma Cousin’s paintings focus on the internal frictions of self, family life and relationships and are drawn from found images, often old photographs, which she believes hold a deceptive truth and document not what people are like, but how they happen to be. Painted in oil paint, and with particularly pronounced brush strokes, Cousin’s work challenges our ways of seeing by creating portraits that dissemble and become abstract stokes of colour, as we try to look closer.

For more information, visit the OVADA website, www.ovada.org.uk

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