Kirsty Whiten Biography

Edinburgh graduate Kirsty Whiten has exhibited internationally and been involved with numerous projects over the last 10 years. She gained notice for her warped large-scale portrait paintings and highly detailed photo-realistic drawings, often containing powerfully subversive content and irreverent humour. Her distinctive drawings and paintings have earned a year's residency in Paris, numerous awards and bursaries and been exhibited as far a field as Cologne, Den Haag and Melbourne.

Her inspirations are just as likely to come from pop culture, fashion or science as from the history of art. A lot of her work is about power-play in personal relationships; submission, domination, manipulation, tenderness, and how this translates to society and culture. Her meticulous treatment of a subject is a kind of reverence, using the detail, the time-hungry technique and a powerful dose of ambiguity to deepen the emotional impact.