Throughout time portrait has changed its function, purpose, many times. Today, portrait doesn’t just show or imitate reality, what has also become important is the essence and the aura of a person. Contemporary portrait doesn’t just speak of the persons social or financial status, like it used to, today we put upfront the persons values, interests and emotions.
Just like art, portraits function also changes and develops through time. In painting, we see multiple new solutions and portrait types (individual, double and group portraits). Such develop-ments also come in printmaking, but here we see a major role in reproductibility. Printmaking in principle combines technical and artistic area of printing, but it also shows, how to properly process a surface of a certain material. Here, precision and experiment meet, and with that, portrait gains a new role and idea, of what it should represent.
Through each period, portrait has always had a leading role, but that changed with the in-vention of photography - portraits role in art, minimalised. Photography takes over representing real-istic images and begins serving as a document, but as soon as photography omits the documentary aspect it becomes equal to traditional art forms, such as painting, printmaking and such. In my thesis I will try to explore all of these aspects, which are directly and indirectly connected to portraits and I will then try to apply this analysis to my own artistic works.
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