Unexpected views

Unexpected views is a series of conversations between our curators and some of the most important artists living and working today.

Discussions focus on selected paintings from our collection, exploring their relevance to the artist’s work, or more broadly to current social and cultural issues.

By allowing for new discussions of old works, the series aims for critical, counter-intuitive and joyful approaches to our collection, which reflect the breadth of contemporary artistic practice.

For this session, Annabel Bai Jackson, our Dorset Curatorial Fellow for Modern and Contemporary Projects, is joined by the Glasgow-born artist Kaye Donachie, best known for her muted, figurative paintings. This evening they discuss Donchie's work in relation to Catharina van Hemessen's 'Portrait of a Woman', 1551.

Kaye Donachie was born in Glasgow and now lives and works in London, UK. Throughout her work, she interprets avant-garde women, using history and biography, alongside an archive of found and personal imagery to conjure up characters and tableaus that are at once mysterious and deeply evocative. Often the paintings are a description of time and place that drift between dream and reality, an echo of the past re-imagined in the present. Donachie shows at Peres Projects in Berlin and Maureen Paley in London. Her work has been reviewed in Frieze and Artforum.