Kiki Lamers (1964)
Kiki Lamers made her international breakthrough with her hyper-realistic portraits of children. In this series of imposing canvasses, complex faces peered back at the viewer. Lamers was interested in discovering the child's inner world. Before portraiting the children, she recorded their body language, gestures, glances and facial expressions on vast numbers of slides and photographs. Somewhere among all those images was the key to truly capturing the essence of each child. She blended all their moods on the canvas in a limited range of rosy-grey tints. The result: unconventional portraits of adolescents and small children lost in thought, revealing their inner selves: anger, sadness, boredom, wonder and openness. In them, they are themselves, still virtually untouched by the outside world.
After a series of landscapes and still lifes in which human presence was very tangible but yet invisible, Lamers returned to the portrait. This time, the pressure of the outside world on her subjects was very present. In this series, she paints people in close-up with animal masks. With an even more refined colour palette technique, in this series her grey and pink tints hang over the subject like mist.
