Photo: Untitled, collage, 2003 by Kirsten Glass. Courtesy One in the Other, London.

Julie Penfold headed to Sunderland to do some beauty analysing of her own.

How we assess beauty and what society deems as beautiful is put under scrutiny in The Analysis of Beauty at Sunderland’s Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art until September 11.

The Analysis of Beauty takes its title from William Hogarth’s 1753 essay of the same name, which put forward a controversial argument of what beauty might mean – its location, causes and consequences.

The seven featured artists each echo these concerns, all approaching the topic from different angles.

Photo: Missy, fingernails and Rene Z, pencil on paper, 2004 by Dawn Mellor. Courtesy Victoria Miro Gallery, London.

Alistair Robinson, exhibition curator and NGCA’s programme director, said: "As a Curator, my job is to visit galleries and studios, seeking out interesting artists and identifying trends in the art world."

"The purpose of this exhibition is to showcase this new talent and reflect the art world’s current preoccupation with beauty."

Louise Harris’s series of translucent watercolours are based on portraits from Vogue magazine. The models’ faces are transformed into a glowing field of colour characterised by their uniform appearance of electric blue eyes, plump pink lips and tousled blonde hair.

The models are made to look imperfect with make up strewn across their faces, their eyes lost in smudged cosmetics and smeared lipstick, which gives them a hedonistic demeanour. The artist even distorts the models’ bone structure to the brink of ugliness.

Photo: Untitled, watercolour on paper, 2004 by Louise Harris.

Kirsten Glass orchestrates a cast of characters, taken from fashion magazines, who are enlarged, interrupted, dismembered and distorted and enveloped as fluorescent colour cut-up collages.

Jean-Pierre Khazem presents a series of photographs of cherubic models in blissful rural settings. They all wear incredibly lifelike silicon masks, which blur the line between fantasy and reality producing an altogether too perfect half-woman half-doll image.

Oonagh Hegarty’s obsessive, labour-intensive collages disrupt the workings of 'glamour' photography, daytime television and tabloid news, through the addition of literally thousands of layers of translucent material.

28,710 refers to the number of pieces of sellotape used to completely cover the screen of a portable television transforming a bland daytime programme into a dazzling dance of light.

Photo: 28,710, mixed media, 2003 by Oonagh Hegarty. Photograph Nigel Davison.

Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor and Monica Lewinsky are among the celebrities Dawn Mellor presents painted with unexpected attributes, which offer a side to their characters the public has never seen before.

Jenny Nordquist offers the most disturbing, thought-provoking work of the exhibition in the form of real-life pictures of women undergoing plastic surgery.

The pictures, whilst rather nauseating, are cautionary tales of the violence done to the body in our quest for ideal beauty, which is now taking on evermore extremes.

The Analysis of Beauty is an inspired exhibition that offers refreshing, clever and thought-provoking ideas as it explores how close the beauty and the beast really are inside all of us.