Self Portraits - Overview – Käthe Kollwitz Museum Köln. Feminist & Self-Portrait Artists. Reflections on the Self: From Dürer to Struth. Christie’s Mayfair, London 2 June – 5 September 2015 by ANNA McNAY Artists since time immemorial have painted self-portraits: at times because models’ fees were beyond their meagre means; at times because they found themselves in isolation; at times simply because no one knows anyone as well as he knows himself and such intimate knowledge permits exploration, honesty and the freedom to experiment, and fulfils the desire to express.
For its sixth exhibition, Christie’s Mayfair, the auction house’s dedicated exhibition space, brings together more than 50 artists and 70 works showing the diversity of media, formats and styles used by artists to reflect their selves, from Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) to Thomas Struth (b1954). A rare 15th-century woodcut by the former, The Bathhouse (c1496-97), depicts the artist leaning on a wooden support, a tap comically positioned where his genitals should be, wistfully watching the other men as they bathe.
Lucian Freud: The Self-portraits. Royal Academy of Arts, London 27 October 2019 – 26 January 2020 by BETH WILLIAMSON Lucian Freud (1922-2011) is well known for his paintings of the human figure and particularly the nude.
Like many artists, he also engaged in self-portraiture, although he was unusual in his repeated return to the genre throughout his long career. The 56 works in this exhibition at the Royal Academy range from the linear and graphic works of his youth to the increasingly painterly forms of his middle years and old age. The self-portraits are intense, intimate and visceral and act to chart his artistic development more broadly. As someone who greatly valued his privacy, there is a curious dilemma at the heart of Freud’s self-portraits and they are not straightforward. Lucian Freud. Drawing began as a childhood obsession for Freud, who was included in an exhibition of children’s drawings at the Guggenheim Jeune gallery in London in 1938. Lucian Freud. Lucian Freud. Lucian Freud. Maria Lassnig. Tate Liverpool 18 May – 18 September 2016 by ANNA McNAY “[The body] is more or less the most difficult subject to paint.
Something you don’t actually see”.1 This summer, Tate Liverpool is going all out with (often quite grotesque) paintings of the body, exploring the fundamental problem of its location, both on canvas and in the world, by presenting a double bill of exhibitions of two key figurative artists from the 20th century, Francis Bacon (1909-92) and Maria Lassnig (1919-2014).
While the former is a household name, the latter is significantly less well known, despite a career spanning 70 years and time spent in Vienna, Paris and New York. Graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna in 1945, Lassnig was already producing work that radically departed from Nazi-approved academic realism. In Spacemen in a Cube (1967), Lassnig struggles to fit the body into a confined space – a space within a space or frame within a frame – leaving the outlines of the forms unfilled in. Self-Representation in Islamic Art: Emotions in the Mirror. Some extracts from Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Mural read through visual Arabic (self) portrayal art One day, I will be what I want to be.One day, I will be a bird, and will snatch my being out of my nothingness.
The more my wings burn, the more I near my truth and arise from the ashes.I am the dreamer’s speech, having forsaken body and soulto continue my first journey to what set me on fire and vanished:The Meaning. I am absence. The pursuit of heaven. Hanaa Malallah – Self-Portrait 2, 2012 I am the stranger. Huguette Calande – Self Portrait (Bribes de Corps), 1973 At the door, I sat wondering: Am I he?
Laila Muraywid – Les Angoises Humides, 2008 Sailors surround me, but there is no harbor.Vanity devoured my subtlest phrase and my most direct word.I couldn’t find the time to identify with my intermediate position.I didn’t ask yet about the blurring similarity between exit and entrance.I couldn’t find death so as to pursue life.I found no voice to scream:Time!