Martha Zmpounou is a London based visual artist and former student of the MA in Communication Design at Central Saint Martins where she graduated in 2011 with distinction. She has participated in numerous exhibitions in Greece and the UK and was awarded the 2011 De Laszlo Foundation award by the Royal society of Portrait Painters.

“These works are a part of the Inverted Portraits series, inspired by the idea of portraiture. The portrait is seen as a ‘space’ where individual identities are expressed and exposed. By nature, a portrait establishes a presence. For a work of art to be considered as such, the artist must have the intent to portray a specific, actual person. Traditionally, it is aimed at being a medium to communicate social roles and power, status and assets. It manifests how the depicted person wants to be seen and perceived. My work attempts to challenge this condition.

Rather than depicting particular individuals, the Inverted portraits are about common human traits; each work is based on an element of what we call self-identity and is supposed to be either hidden or absent from a portrait. The idea of the persona and the mask that both hides and reveals, the Jungian shadow, the distance between public and self image, were some of the main themes for the Inverted portraits.

The figures are treated as visual symbols positing human identity mainly as a psychological compound. Defaced figures are striped off their individualities whilst body parts are treated as being an outward projection and a representative fragment of the self, a metaphor for the persona. Found imagery is assembled in a way that highlights the multifaceted and always in flux postmodern identity. The latter is a product of a process of mimicking without an original. Yet, the very act of mimicking produces ‘the original’ (Butler). It is grounded on an absence.

It is this absence that serves as a starting point but also as the backbone of my work.”