Thao Nguyen is a visual artist based in Berlin, Germany.
Working primarily with oils and acrylics, Thao creates a body of work that exclusively features portraiture.
The paintings are developed through the use of found imagery and most notably film stills from contemporary cinema which enable the basis for character-driven portrait studies, ultimately on the search for what makes us human.
On Art and Cinema
“A significant chunk of reference material for my practice comes from my interest in film. It is particularly the themes of masculinity, social-realist and coming-of-age narratives that I look to further explore through the medium of painting.
Key figures are the characters from Kes (1969), The 400 Blows (1959) and Ratcatcher (1999). My own personal working-class heroes; they are specific character studies of a certain time and place and yet connected through similar experiences of navigating adolescence in a deprived, bleak environment in which the young protagonists struggle to find their own identity.
When I visualise a painting, it often starts with this cinematic notion - whether steming from the tones and colours, soundtrack or atmosphere of a film - I always have key scenes or very particular shots stuck in my head. Then I go in with paint, the first layer always a vivid orange that still shows through after the rough sketch slowly turns into a tangible figure, reflecting an equally complex exploration of the character’s brooding headspace…”