Natasha Michaels – Amendment

$500*

*IFPDA Print Fair wall price. RRP is in GBP£. The equivalent price in US dollars may vary in line with the currency exchange rate on the day of purchase.

Amendment reimagines Rembrandt’s portrait of Maria Trip as an uneasy encounter between past and present. Eyes are transformed into cartoonish expressions of contempt and uncertainty, introducing a tension that disrupts the quiet authority of the original. In this playful, unsettling form, Maria becomes both artist’s creation and a projection of her contemporary anxieties. Her image is no longer merely the passive object of the painter’s gaze, but a mutable presence. The work invites us to consider how women’s likenesses have been mediated through history, as reflection of their times and as sites of reinvention. The resulting portrait is a hybrid figure—part artist, part sitter, part something else.

Natasha Michaels’ monoprints seem to arrive at the intersection of history and the present, casting a disorienting glance at the past, while fixing an uneasy, almost accusatory stare on the present. Drawing on the rich, formal language of Renaissance and 19th-century portraiture, Michaels works with a palpable ambivalence—both celebrating and upending these traditional forms. She wrestles the originals, twisting and contorting them until they are transformed into something else, something decidedly more uncertain. Her sitters, who once stood as icons of power and permanence, are rendered awkward, perplexed, even uncomfortable, as if unsure of their place in the world.

Michaels studied at the Royal College of Art (1994-96) and St Martins School of Art (1989-1992). She was recently shortlisted for the Boodle Hatfield Prize and recipient of the Ushaw Residency Award and exhibition. Other awards include the 2021 Jealous Gallery Prize. Her work is in the public collections of The Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Pallant House Gallery, Chichester; Chippenham Museum and Holburne Museum, Bath.