WINCHESTER.- The BP Portrait Award is regarded as one of the most prestigious portrait painting competitions in the world. Following its principal display at the National Portrait Gallery in London, the subsequent touring exhibition will visit Winchester for the first time ever.

The BP Portrait Award enjoys revered status amongst painters and collectors alike, acting as an important showcase for some of the most outstanding and innovative painters across the globe.

Indeed, the winner of the 2018 Award, Miriam Escofet, hails from Barcelona but is now resident in London. The second and third placed artists - Felicia Forte and Zhu Tongyao - are from New York and China respectively.

The 2018 competition attracted over 2667 entries from artists based in more than 88 countries.

The exhibition, which opens at The Gallery in Winchester’s Discovery Centre on Saturday 30 March 2019, features a variety of styles and approaches to the contemporary painted portrait - from informal and personal studies of friends and family to revealing paintings of famous faces.

Miriam Escofet’s wonderfully sensitive portrait of her mother - titled An Angel at my Table (pictured above) - will take centre stage. The viewer’s eye is immediately drawn to Miriam’s tender image of her mother, also an artist, but closer examination reveals that items of crockery and a small sculpture that evokes the Louvre’s famous Winged Victory of Samothrace, appear to be moving across the table in the foreground.

US painter Felicia Forte’s arresting portrait of her boyfriend, Matthew, taking a nap (Time Traveller, Matthew Napping) is remarkable for its size and bold, bright hues. In contrast, Chinese artist Zhu Tongyao’s depiction of a young Italian boy, Simone, has an almost photographic quality. The subject of the painting lived next door to Zhu while he was studying in Florence. Simone’s mother is Italian and his father is American and this is reflected in the two churches in the background: one is distinctly Italianate and the other is realised in the familiar American style.

The BP Young Artist Award of £9,000 for the work of a selected entrant aged between 18 and 30 was won by 28-year-old Ania Hobson for A Portrait of two Female Painters, a portrait of the artist with her sister in law. The judges liked the handling of paint and directness in this work, capturing an interesting air of mystery around the relationship of the two young women.

The winner of the BP Travel Award 2018, an annual prize to enable artists to work in a different environment on a project related to portraiture, was Robert Seidel for his proposal to travel along the route of the river Danube by train, boat and bike to connect with people and make portraits in the regions through which the river passes. His work David can be seen in the show.

Kirsty Rodda, Exhibitions Manager at Hampshire Cultural Trust, commented: “It has long been our ambition to bring this prestigious exhibition to Hampshire and we are so thrilled to see it in our 2019 programme. The quality of the submissions is incredibly high and the talent enviable; a genuine ‘must-see’ in Winchester this spring.”