BP Portrait Award 2005 - Softcover

The BP Portrait Award, now in its twenty-sixth year, is a popular fixture on the summer calendar, and is the leading showcase for young artists specializing in portraiture. The competition is open to artists from around the world and this year received a record-number of over 1000 entrants, all competing for the main prize of £25,000. As well as featuring all the entries from this year's competition, this arresting book includes a fascinating essay by Philip Hensher and portraits of people in the old Persian bazaar in Tehran by Darvish Fakhr, the BP travel-award winner 2004. Fakhr's paintings show the depths of emotion behind outwardly ritualised lives and aim to help us understand the common humanity that links the Western world and the Middle East. Philip Hensher's essay explores privacy and mystery in portraiture, focusing on the intimate relationship between painter and sitter. Hensher is the youngest writer in the Oxford Companion to English Literature and A.S. Byatt's Oxford Book of the English Short Story. He is a critic, journalist and writer of novels and short stories. His fiction includes The Mulberry Empire, The Bedroom of the Mister's Wife and Pleasured. Published to accompany the summer exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, from June 15 to September 25 2005; Sunderland Museum and Winter Gardens, from October 6 to November 27; and The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, from December 17 2005 to March 12 2006.