Keith Cunningham’s vast collection of portraits is enigmatic and psychologically charged. These work, encompassing oil paintings, drawings and etching, are not portraits in the conventional sense of reproducing a specific likeness or personality. Instead, they explore the face and head as sites of physicality and identity. In his drawings, Cunningham often reduces the head to a set of reduced gestural marks produced on a small, empty surface. Features are quickly sketched, yet full of detail and life. Faces are expressive and invite prolonged looking. Cunningham sometimes executed these diminutive works on public transport, noticing interesting faces of commuters around him and rapidly fixing them on paper.

His oil paintings are starker and more intense, and bring a heavier, more tactile sensibility. Heads emerge from thick, layered fields of paint — often frontal, sometimes isolated in dark grounds, stripped of context. At times, the facial structure almost dissolves into the surrounding space. These portraits do not affirm the individual but confront the viewer with something more elemental: a presence shaped by time, material, and silence. Throughout, Cunningham treats the portrait not as a record of a sitter, but as a formal and emotional inquiry. The focus is on compression, ambiguity and the psychological charge of the gaze, whether absent, averted or direct.