"Sleep Paralysis" Painting

Conor Collins is a self-taught Manchester artist whose figurative paintings use portraiture, text and materials loaded with cultural and political meaning to examine power, identity, queer history, celebrity and the politics of looking. His work takes familiar images and gives them something harder to ignore.

Collins is currently presenting his solo exhibition *To See and Be Seen* at HOME Manchester, responding to the Queer Up North archive and the city’s queer histories. His work has been exhibited internationally and in major UK institutions, including BOZAR Brussels, the House of Commons and Scarborough Art Gallery. He won the START Art Prize, with the resulting exhibition presented at BOZAR Brussels, and has been shortlisted or selected for the Aesthetica Art Prize, VAA Artist of the Year and New Light.

His work has been featured by TIME, The Independent, The Economist, BBC and The Guardian, and is held in collections including those of Sir Ian McKellen, Stephen Fry and Giorgio Armani.

Collins is interested in the uncomfortable space between looking and being looked at: who gets seen, who gets remembered, and who gets to control the image.

For Collins, a portrait is never simply a likeness. It is a negotiation between the person seen, the person looking and everything neither of them can quite hide.