Portraits -- Angela Flowers

The Judgement of Paris and Düsseldorf (Portrait of Angela Flowers)
Oil on canvas, 77.5 x 65.5 cm, 1971-72
NPG (7)

522 x 400 pixels, 33 Kb
796 x 610 pixels, 63 Kb
1004 x 770 pixels, 94 Kb
1304 x 1000 pixels, 99 Kb

 

Portraits:
Angela Flowers

Art dealer; owner of the Angela Flowers Gallery and Flowers East, London; the portrait was painted at 102 Grove Park.

The Portrait Works (1989),  p. 81.

 

This is the only portrait involving the procedures used in Benches (Tate Gallery) and the many other compositions from postcard sources that I made in the early seventies. These usually consisted of a central image surrounded by colour catalogues (spaced according to chance) and subscribed with details of their sources. Here, in the portrait of Angela Flowers, I had the opportunity to use a fragment of a postcard of Düsseldorf that had not fitted into any previous work (though another part of the same card is used in Ein Deutsches Requiem (Ludwig Collection). Most of these pictures were first shown in Angela's Gallery above the AIA (where I had my first show) in Lisle Street. She is seen here both in front of a icture and inside it (Since no such picture separately exists) thereby of course sharing its title. She had recently shown my work at art fairs in Paris and Düsseldorf and therefore the presence of three women in the picture as a whole, plus the hint of a golden apple in the hand of the statue in the postcard image, led to the words which can be assumed to the The Judgement of Paris and Düsseldorf. Angela is sitting in an Art Nouveau chair bought from Austin's of Peckham where I had also purchased the first copy of A Human Document. Her image was painted from a series of drawing made in my studio. This theme of pictures within pictures and the ambiguities it can call up has recently started interesting me again.

The Portrait Works (1989),  p. 26.

 

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