PARALLEL LIVES

Alexander Van Armstrong is a School of London painter with a more Romantic outlook than his masters, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud.

He is best known for his monumental Heads, which are prized by collectors on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rivaling the physical presence of the Stone Monoliths of Easter Island, these ambiguous, enigmatic works point to a distant past, when the World was young.

Subject matter from both Antiquity and Modern times is explored, blurring distinctions between Mythology and History.

Some of the heads reference the pathos of Shelley’s sonnet, Ozymandias, which reflects upon the idea of human grandeur eroded by the sands of time.

Others portray tragic heroic archetypes like Orestes and Prometheus.

Poignant and solemn in equal measure, Van Armstrong’s heads are characterized by powerful paint handling, tempered by Sfumato and Chiarascuro, refinements associated with Old Masters like Leonardo and Rembrandt.

Despite the unnerving physical impact of these huge pieces, the artist’s treatment of subject matter is sympathetic, as befits a Romantic.

While his small portraits of composers and painters share a quantum of artistic DNA with Bacon and Freud, his giant portrait heads are an extreme expansion into territory beyond the purview of his London masters.

His first successful experiment in this direction was an eight feet tall portrait of a British coal miner. It was bought by one of the Sainsbury family.

Van Armstrong has gone on to produce over 30 such heads.

His work is privately funded by notable individuals, ranging from philanthropists, heiresses, diplomats and business leaders to an American film director, Spike Lee.

At 24 feet wide and 8 feet tall, OZYMANDIAS is one of the most extreme paintings of our time. It reprises Francis Bacon’s adoption of the triptych as a formal device, while preserving much of the poignancy of Bacon's portraiture, but here on an astonishing scale - 100 times life size.

Like a film director, the artist has a small cast of familiar characters, who regularly feature in his works. One of these is cast as Ozymandias.

Sebastian Ferretti, University of Chicago

January 2026