When the English artist Somaya Critchlow was at art school around a decade ago, she once showed a tutor a painting she had made of her cousins sitting on a sofa. When the teacher likened it to the glam-realist style of David Hockney, Critchlow was taken aback.
“This sucks,” she recalled thinking. “That’s not what I want to paint.”
Critchlow was developing a deep affinity for the naked form at the time. But that felt at odds with everything she was learning at art school about conceptual art, and everything her feminist mother had taught her about female objectification.
For Critchlow, 31, the shift that happened when modernism took over as the dominant form of artistic expression never resonated. She likes her paintings old — Renaissance era, to be specific. Even…