Katinka Lampe and Colin Chillag Present Anonymous Portraits at Elizabeth Houston Gallery

Elizabeth Houston Gallery in New York City hosted two partially overlapping exhibitions exploring anonymous portraiture. Katinka Lampe's show 'Let’s Change History' ran from September 5 to October 20, 2018, featuring portraits with a motion-blur effect reminiscent of analog video interlacing. Her works, titled with seven-digit numbers like 5065184 (2018) and 6080171 (2017), present sitters whose faces exhibit a shivering stillness. One painting, 6080179 (2017), depicts a girl with a complex hairstyle facing away, evoking references to Vermeer and Goya's 'Charles IV and Family' from 1800. Colin Chillag's exhibition 'It is Important to be Nobody' was on view from September 5 to December 8, 2018, in the basement gallery. His portraits distort school photographs through digital glitch-like effects, as seen in 'Portrait of a Girl 2' (2018), where high-key backdrops merge with faces. Chillag also presented two larger paintings based on classroom group photos: 'Class Portrait' (2018), where students merge into an amorphous pink mass, and 'It is important to be Nobody' (2018), with figures partially obscured by opaque paint blobs. Both artists challenge traditional portraiture's function of depicting identity, instead creating works where sitters remain unidentifiable through numerical codes or facial distortions. The gallery is located at 190 Orchard Street, between Stanton and East Houston streets.