Meet The Artist Behind Those Gold-Leafed Nobel Prize Illustrations
NDTV
Niklas Elmehed is the man whose portraits of Nobel Prize recipients are used in news articles around the world every year
Niklas Elmehed is part of an exclusive club that can boast of knowing the names of Nobel Prize recipients before they are announced to the rest of the world. He is not a member of the panel of judges, but the man whose gold-leafed portraits of the Nobel Prize winners are used in news articles, publications, magazines and social media posts across the world every year. Final portraits for 2021 Nobel Prize announcement, Economics sciences. @NobelPrize#nobelprize#economics#illustrationoftheday#figurativepainting#goldfoil#artistsatwork#artistworkingon#artistatwork#portraitpaintingpic.twitter.com/gzgAkqrtYu
Niklas Elmehed has painted the official portraits of the Nobel Prize Laureates every year since 2012. Each October, the Nobel Prize organisation announces the names of the new Nobel Laureates, and his portraits are the first official images of the awarded persons.
The Sweden-based artist says that the idea of using paintings, rather than photographs, while announcing the winners stemmed from necessity. "Many of the science laureates are pretty hard to get pictures," Mr Elhemed explained to Popular Science in an interview two years ago. "If you search for a photo, it's a highly pixelated, low-res image on a webpage somewhere in the world. You just find their face on the staff members page, taken with a lousy camera."
