Mystery pervades the portraiture of Canadian artist Karel Funk. Based in Winnipeg, each of the subjects within his photorealistic paintings are disinterested in the viewer’s gaze, emblematic of their facial and bodily orientation. Rather, Funk bypasses the human figure by utilizing the fashion portrayed in his artwork as a focal point to probe into the sartorial zeitgeist of the present, and build a bridge with the traditions of portraiture from art history.
Technical nylon and polyester replace the ornate cuffs and velvet robes the past. Like a drawing within an empty notebook, Funk’s large-scale paintings are set against a white background and feature the silhouette of elaborate outerwear — from highlighter yellow raincoats, iridescent windbreakers to fluorescent pink puffer jackets. His proclivity towards this aesthetic first began when he moved to New York and started seeing a connection between the classic paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the contemporary fashion worn by onlookers.
“One day I saw a friend in profile wearing a hooded rain jacket with the hood up so all you could see was his nose and a little bit of his mouth,” Funk tells Hypeart. “The modern synthetic hood was contemporary, but it could also be a bridge to the past referencing renaissance hoods.”
Through unconscious repetition, Funk began to form a consistent thread within his practice, by taking the overlooked, but unique shapes and textures of modern outerwear, and executing them in a way that adheres to the realism of classic paintings from the Renaissance and Dutch Golden Age. From a distance, his work looks like a photograph, but upon closer inspection, each composition reveals hundreds of intricate acrylic layers that take two months on average to complete.
Admittedly, Funk reveals that he’s largely moved away from showing the human beneath the surface entirely to center the jacket as a “muse” and to “find a struggle to paint information, form and structure in the most interesting and intense way possible.” To retrace the threads of his aesthetic, we caught up with the artist to discuss his practice for the latest Hypeart Visits.
