The human face has become impossible to escape in contemporary art, with portraiture marking 2025 as a defining year through major exhibitions from the "Bodies and Souls" show at the Bourse de Commerce to the Gerhard Richter exhibition at the Louis Vuitton Foundation. This surge reflects a growing fascination with a genre that has been embraced by figurative painting over recent decades, with significant acceleration in recent years.
The portrait, once considered a noble art form dating back to the Fayoum portraits of Roman Egypt executed from the 1st century AD, has clearly emerged from obscurity. "There's no longer the fear of confronting portraiture that existed ten to fifteen years ago, when painting was considered dead, and especially when I was finishing my studies twenty-five years ago," observes advisor and curator Hervé Mikaeloff.
French artist Claire Tabouret, 43, has emerged as a leading figure in this revival, having opened new pathways for portrait artists. Featured last summer at the Museum of Fine Arts in Rennes with numerous loans from the Pinault Collection, Tabouret spent a decade in Los Angeles where she successfully conquered American, French, and Asian audiences. At Frieze New York last May, transatlantic collectors competed fiercely for works from her solo show presented by Galerie Perrotin, particularly a haunting group portrait that has become her signature style.
"Throughout Asia, all the major collectors want Claire Tabouret!" reveals gallerist Almine Rech, who co-represents the artist. "Her portraits are extremely sought after because they possess depth. The artist expresses something autobiographical, though not always, with a form of romanticism. Her paintings speak to the human condition, evoking thought and reverie. A portrait is rarely smiling, rather pensive. This appeals to many people and raises questions about life." In recent years, Tabouret's market value has skyrocketed, with large portraits now reaching $100,000. As the artist has stated, painting allows one "to capture something that escapes us; it's a medium that offers an element of mystery," more so than photography.
This mystery was explored in the exhibition "Eye to Eye," organized last summer at the Jacobins Convent in Rennes, dedicated to faces in the Pinault Collection. "The observation is eloquent: more than half of the collection's works, across all mediums, deal with the human figure!" emphasizes Jean-Marie Gallais, curator of the Pinault Collection. While these works are not all paintings, the predominance is striking. The exhibition "speaks to us about the relationship with the image of oneself and others in the age of social media, invoking the idea of disappearance and the impossibility, sometimes, of capturing a face, an expression, a spirit, an attitude, a soul. Masked gazes mingle with frank looks, intimacy ultimately coexists with eternity."
Portrait painting has found strong support in major French and international collections. In 2023, Jem Perucchini won the Jean-François Prat Prize from the Parisian law firm Bredin-Prat, which has also built its own collection. The Ethiopian-born artist living in Milan drew inspiration from the Sienese school of the Renaissance to paint delicate portraits with faces of color. He also caught the eye of French collector Hélène Nguyen-Ban, who hung his work in her London townhouse.
A taboo appears to have fallen, with new generations embracing portraiture, as seen at MO.CO in Montpellier this year. "I was struck by the interest in the human figure among students at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and in many studios," observes Alexia Fabre, director of the school until March 1, 2025. The exhibition curator sees several factors behind this resurgence. "The COVID crisis put the individual back at the center of the world. This prominence of the face, in regard and in hollow, raises the question of the spectator's gaze placed on the gaze of the one who is painted," she explains. The arrival of AI has further accentuated this need for personal individuality.
A constellation of female artists has largely devoted themselves to the genre. Françoise Pétrovitch focuses on the passage from childhood, with a monumental tapestry on this theme adorning the Design section of the latest Art Paris edition. Miriam Cahn addresses frontal subjects like maternity, while Nathanaëlle Herbelin, 36, who joined the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam's collections in 2024, draws inspiration from her relationships and surroundings. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, 48, a British artist of Ghanaian origin, is prominently featured in major international collections.
These artists are far from classical portraiture, reshuffling the deck entirely. Yiadom-Boakye doesn't work from posed models but from compositions derived from sketchbooks and observations of daily life. As a corollary to the great vogue of African, African-American, or diaspora painters that has emerged in the market in recent years, portraits of subjects of color have proliferated, sometimes to the point of becoming commonplace.
Among the leading figures is Kehinde Wiley, whose fame exploded after painting President Obama's portrait. His major 2022 exhibition at the Fondazione Cini alongside the Venice Biennale, where he revisited great portraits from art history with Black subjects, boosted his visibility significantly. "We mustn't forget that Kehinde first built his work not with commissioned portraits, but wanted to make portraits like in the 17th and 18th centuries, painting individuals met on the street, anonymous people from Harlem, the Bronx, a practice extended worldwide, in Brazilian favelas or Tahiti, sometimes representing transgender people," recalls Anne-Claudie Coric, director of Galerie Templon. "His strength is showing through portrait art the excluded from art history, those we don't look at."
The choice of artists selected to paint a president's portrait is no accident. Previously, photographers Jacques Henri Lartigue and Raymond Depardon created official portraits of Giscard d'Estaing and Mitterrand respectively. More recently, several artists have tackled Barack Obama's figure, including street artist Shepard Fairey in 2008 with his "Hope" poster celebrating America's first Black president, Chuck Close who photographed him in 2012 and produced tapestries for the Obama Foundation, and notably Kehinde Wiley in 2018 with a painting destined for the National Gallery in Washington.
Wiley's realistic portrait shows the president seated, gaze turned toward the viewer, against a slightly pop verdant background. Along with his wife Michelle's portrait, this iconic image has been exhibited throughout the United States, anchoring the image of a young, modern Black American president in posterity. He recently exhibited new portraits of Surinamese residents, former Dutch colony subjects, at Amsterdam's Van Loon Museum, a classic mansion of a wealthy merchant.
In another genre, there's Amoako Boafo, whose global market has seen dramatic price increases from $50,000 a few years ago to over $1.5 million at auction, though this is now stabilizing. "He's closely followed by other current African artists who consider him a mentor," notes Mikaeloff.
Portraiture is becoming more intimate, changing its face. For Alexia Fabre, current painters "create a palette with their cries, commitments, and battles, where faces form a more or less sketched, more or less portrayed humanity, like a convocation of human force." Beyond the circle of Black or mixed-race artists, numerous artists now use portraiture to represent their universe.
This includes Nazanin Pouyandeh (Galerie Templon), whose painting serves as a fight for women echoing her tragic family history intimately linked to Iran's story. There's also self-taught Edi Dubien, who belongs to this "family" of artists examining adolescence and its representation. The artist, who underwent a late-life gender transition, creates portraits of teenagers with animals, depicting experiences they never lived. These "fictional and melancholic" portraits, as described by gallerist Alain Gutharc, were featured at Paris's Museum of Hunting and Nature last summer, with paintings on paper selling between 2,000 and 8,000 euros depending on format.
Other examples include Canadian artist Chris Knight's masculine portraits selling rapidly at Galerie Alain Gutharc. At Art Paris last April, young gallery Edji sold out completely with portraits of young men by Chinese artist Killion Huang (born 1999), featuring intimate and solitary pastel or oil scenes priced between under 1,000 and 10,000 euros. In all three cases, buyers include not only men but also women and male-female couples.
"Human beings love to see themselves," concludes Almine Rech. "Portraiture will never lose its seduction." These three different artists represent three revelatory successes in a genre that continues to evolve and captivate collectors worldwide, proving that the ancient art of portraiture remains as relevant and compelling as ever in contemporary art markets.
