Distant Ancestor VII (2011-12)

Ryan Mosley painted these series of large, enigmatic portraits with the intention to create a visual, though fictional, family tree. By using an oval canvas as the base for his portraits, a historic pictorial device, Mosley deliberately chooses to escape from the ‘the constraints of modernity’, as he formulates it. At the same time, however, by portraying the figures in his own distinctive painterly style, Mosley renders the works contemporary and avoids employing the principles of traditional portraiture. Mosley explores the paradox between historic and contemporary portraiture that is inevitably at the heart of these works.

While Mosley was creating this fictional family tree, the BBC broadcast Who do you think you are?, a show in which celebrities trace their ancestry and uncover past secrets. Mosley was also inspired by his own family’s search for its ancestors. His grandfather had attempted to retrace their family tree, secretly hoping to discover that the family were descendants of an influential sixteenth-century earl. Although it was not a futile attempt – according to Mosley ‘he unearthed that they had been standing in the same muddy field for the last couple of hundred years’ – his initial hopes were dashed. His grandfather’s imagined idea of who his ancestors could have been made Mosley realise that the portraits he has painted, although fictitious, allude to the infinite possibilities of an unknown past.

Distant Ancestor VII and Distant Ancestor XIII, gifted to the Graves Gallery (Museums Sheffield) by Ryan Mosley, reveal not only the endless possibilities of earlier times but also the importance of the search for lineage, belonging and identity. This theme of identity finds resonance in Sheffield’s art collection, where the subject is a thread, which runs from early portraits from the eighteenth century up to the present. In more recent years, Museums Sheffield has focused on collecting works which interrogate what identity means and how it is constructed, exploring the tension between personal, political and national identity as well as how collective identity is created. These two works not only extend Sheffield’s contemporary collection, joining works by artists including Sutapa Biswas, Hew Locke, and Kate˘rina Šedá, but also provided a fascinating counterpoint to the historic portraits in the collection.

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