Contemporary and post-modern period portrait approaches in today's art

A portrait in a classical sense, is a genre of art that is used to define pictures and photographs in which face of a person whose chest or knee-level torso is visible would be portrayed. Yet apart from this definition, there are also portraits that include the entire body based on the expectations in a particular period. Regardless of how portrayed, time stops for an instant on the face of the person and this instantaneous expression hosts the traces of life. Reflection of the expression on the surface of a picture is formed with the connection between the artist and the model. Expectations of the model can directly influence the creation process of the artist, as well as becoming a manifestation tool for the same artist. The art of portraits which can be examined in various categories such as bust portraits, fayyums, self-portraits, ordered portraits, group portraits, manifestation portraits, has direct interaction with the cultural structure of the society. With changing sense of art, the content of the art also changed. Along with technological developments, the art of portrait gained a new point of view in terms of sense and form, therefore enabled artists to break out of classical methods during production processes. Particularly after 1960, versatile tendencies in art brought the art of portrait a conceptional perspective and the portrait became the expression tool of the artist. Even though a distinct perspective for portraits in contemporary art from classical period exists, there are inseparable formal similarities of the art of portraits. Regardless of the period, as long as the face of the person endures, a portrait produces an effect on the spectators and communicates in view of uniqueness of the identity and the personality. In this study, development process of the art of portrait during contemporary and post-modern period was examined and different perspectives on the art of portraits in today's art were rendered through reference artists from spatiotemporal aspect. Analysis of the works was associated with social structure and artistic perception of the period. To be able to place today's art in an accurate frame, a comprehensive literature search was carried out and the art of portrait was analyzed in a historical sense with a chronological approach.