Portrait nominee

My Chiaroscuro portraits illustrate children in the style of Old Master paintings. I am interested in reproducing the light and atmosphere of renaissance paintings with photography as a means to reconsider both mediums and revisit another era.
The sombre and emotionless expressions of the children in the paintings of this period do not alarm us on canvas but meeting their gaze in a contemporary photograph is quite different and unsettling.
I chose this subject for my portraits when I fell upon a trunk of antique clothing at my step-father’s home in Burgundy. Working with these garments which hadn’t been touched in years and resuscitating them, as such, was quite a ceremonial and emotional experience. The children featured are my own and those of friends and family which also makes this a very personal project. The photographs are titled after the real names of the children featured within them.

"Chiaroscuro: (Italian for light-dark), in art, is the use of strong contrasts between light and dark, usually bold contrasts affecting a whole composition. It is also a technical term used by artists and art historians for the use of contrasts of light to achieve a sense of volume in modelling three-dimensional objects

Alexandra Diez de Rivera is a Spanish-Argentine visual artist based in London working with photography. Her work deals with absence and psychologically ambiguous objects and spaces that are empty but charged.

Diez de Rivera’s work has been featured in publications such as Vanity Fair, FT Magazine, Shanghai Daily, and Le Point and exhibited in galleries both nationally and internationally. She is represented in private collections in Europe, China, the US and UAE. Diez de Rivera was selected for 'London Grads Now 21' at the Saatchi Gallery, The Travers Smith CSR Art Programme 2021/ 2022 and The Pupil Sphere Showcase 2021. She was a finalist of the 2020 Critical Mass Competition and was invited to join the ‘Fair Art Fair’ community in June 2021. Diez de Rivera holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication and Graphic Design from Central Saint Martins University and a Master’s degree in Photography from the Royal College of Art.

Exhibitions include, 'After the High Tide' at Cromwell Place and 'London Grads Now 21' at the Saatchi Gallery in London.