The Independent says of her “Annie Kevans has an eye for what makes an eye-catching portrait. Her oil-on-paper likenesses look simple, almost childlike, but they come with a sting in the tail. The 36-year-old artist began painting in her final year at St Martin’s with Boys, a set of pictures of dictators as children – a blue-eyed Hitler in a simple brown jacket, a wan Franco, a petulant Pol Pot. “People think it’s a bit naff, really cutesy and then, oof, it’s Hitler.”
The portraits are not actual likenesses but rather the product of guesswork and imagination. She had spent months looking for pictures of infant dictators finding them very hard to come by so she abandoned her search “I thought, ‘Does it matter anyway if I make them up?’ It caused quite a lot of debate.” And interest, too: Charles Saatchi snapped up the degree show in its entirety. ”
At the art fair Volta in Basel this summer, she presented All the Presidents’ Girls, a series of portraits of Presidential mistresses. Many such as Marilyn Monroe and Monica Lewinsky are well known but some such as Sally Hemings, the 15-year-old slave and maid to Thomas Jefferson’s daughter, who became pregnant with the President’s child, are not so well known.
In her latest exhibition she has turned her attention to mental illness and addiction. The exhibition “Ship of Fools” features portraits of Michael Jackson,(above) Winston Churchill, Mark Twain, Drew Barrymore and Princess Diana, Vincent Van Gogh amongst others. She says of the show “I’ve always been interested in madness – there’s a lot of it in my family,”
Ship of Fools opens today and continues until 23 December in FAS on New Bond Street, London W1 �
