leevc

[leevc]

Urs Lüthi is a Swiss eclectic and innovative Conceptual artist. During his long career, he has experimented with various styles and techniques – including photography, sculpture, performance, silk-screen, video and painting. He is famous for placing his body and his alter ego in the center of artworks, trying to grasp his own self and question the reality.

Self-Portraits

Lüthi is using his own body and acting skills to question the reality and include the viewers in his explorations. By playing his false twin, he is inviting us to learn more about the periods he has lived through, his relationships, or global phenomena, such as the power of brands and advertising. His provoking work uses irony and self-irony to make his self the artwork, treating a life as an aesthetic experience.

Selfportrait – Photo on Canvas, 85 x 125, 1976

BRON

[leevc]

VALIE EXPORT created her black and white photographs Identity Transfer 1, 2 and 3 (P79178, P79179and P79180) soon after creating her artistic identity as ‘VALIE EXPORT’. Born Waltraud Lehner, she rejected both her father’s name and that of her former husband (Höllinger) and reinvented herself using the name of an Austrian cigarette brand, EXPORT, that marketed itself as unique – ‘semper und unique, immer und überall’ (quoted in Ob/De+Con(Struction, p.26). In a mock advertising shot she had herself photographed holding out a packet of VALIE EXPORT cigarettes, bearing her own face on its side, to the viewer (VALIE EXPORT – SMART EXPORT, 1970). Her pose is confrontational and macho – a burning cigarette clamped between her lips, she looks down at the viewer from under virtually closed eyelids – while an area of breast visible above the low neckline of her leaf-patterned dress emphasises her femininity. 

Valie Export, Identity Transfer 1, 1968, printed late 1990s

BRON

[leevc]

ORLAN is a contemporary French artist known for the radical act of changing her appearance with plastic surgery in the name of art. Similar to the self-portraits of Cindy Sherman, ORLAN uses her face and body as malleable tools for shifting identities. “I have been the first artist to use aesthetic surgery in another context—not to appear younger or better according to the designated pattern. I wanted to disrupt the standards of beauty,” she explained.

“Beauty is becoming less about luck and more about choice.”

Portrait of the French artist and performer Orlan, taken by photographer Fabrice Lévêque in 1997.

BRON

[leevc]

When Cindy Sherman arrived at art school in Buffalo, New York, in 1972, she wanted to become a painter, but soon decided there was nothing more to say in the medium and tossed her brushes aside. Meanwhile, she was dressing up in thrift-store rags, attending parties as a range of characters. A fellow student, her then-boyfriend Roberto Longo, suggested she take these everyday disguises into the studio and photograph herself.

Surprisingly good advice, as it turned out. From the mid 1970s to the present day, Cindy Sherman has portrayed herself as baffled starlets, aging zillionaires, troubled loners, and disturbing clowns, among countless other characters, in a wide-ranging series of photographs that has made her among the most influential—and expensive—artists on the planet, with retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art and record-breaking prices at auction.

The "Clowns" series from 2003

BRON

[leevc]

Lee Godie: In her striking self-portraits, snapped in extravagant dress-up at Greyhound stations, the homeless Lee Godie created a world of beauty and glamour for herself. The remarkable story of the “bag lady artist” of Chicago captures the enduring power of fantasy, and dissolves the boundary between art and life.

“Lee appeared, dressed in her patchwork fur coat with orange rounds of rouge painted on to her cheeks straight from her watercolour palette”

Lee Godie, untitled, n.d. Collection of Scott H. Lang, IL.

BRON

[leevc]

Tomasz Machciński, born 1942 in Poland, is a self-taught photographer and performer. As a war orphan, he received an autograph card from the Hollywood star actress Joan Tompkins with the words “With Love to ‘Tommy’ From ‘Mother’ Joan” as a part of a so-called remote adoption programme. For the first twenty years of his life, he was therefore convinced that Tompkins was his mother. The end of his “American Dream” and the loss of this supposed identity influenced Machciński’s artistic work.

To date, his oeuvre consists of more than 22,000 fictitious or appropriated identities, captured in both photographic and film selfportraits. In his staging, the artist nonchalantly embodies stars of the silver screen, icons of pop culture, figures from history, literature and politics, and other eccentric characters. His work depicts a variety of characters of different ethnic, sexual or social affiliations.

At the same time, these characters are also reinventions of his own identity. “Instead of wigs or tricks, I show everything that happens to my body, such as: hair regrowth, tooth loss, diseases, aging processes, etc.” By alternately revealing and hiding the weaknesses of his body, he lends it new meaning. In his work, Machciński serves as director and actor, make-up and costume designer, archivist, photographer and performance artist all at the same time. On the one hand his artistic practice is related to the European Art History through the play with the traditional methods of portraying and its conventions.

Untitled, 2013

BRON

[leevc]

There is an image so astonishing in this epochal exhibition you can hardly tear your eyes away. It is a self-portrait by the great South African photographer Zanele Muholi. The non-binary artist appears in profile like the head on a medal, lips white, skin black, against a grainy monochrome ground. Their hair flares upwards in flames so bright they appear virtually silver in the darkness.

Or so it seems at first. Perhaps the effect is more like a towering crown, a luminous diadem or a highly patterned headdress. The cultural overtones keep on running, all the way from ancient statues to vorticist painting. But the moment you notice that this hair is in fact a complicated arrangement of afro combs, the political nuances start to ramify. The self-portrait deepens as you look.

Muholi was born in Durban in 1972. Their self-portraits have extraordinary graphic force, increasing the contrast so that the artist appears stunningly black in all their regal strength and stoicism. Here is Muholi got up as a black-and-white minstrel, a tribesperson with coils of sinister rope nooses for hair, or with fuse wire around their neck. In one image, only the whites of the eyes are visible; in another, the artist appears in a miner’s helmet, with the implication that they have just risen up from the darkest depths of the earth, bearing the coal dust of their labour.

‘Regal strength and stoicism’: Qiniso, The Sails, Durban, 2019

BRON

[leevc]

In his most well-known painting, The Arnolfini Portrait (1434), Early Netherlandish painter Jan van Eyck presents wealthy Italian merchant Giovanni di Nicolao Arnolfini and his first wife, Costanza Trenta. On the surface, the piece appears to be a simple double portrait. However, a closer look reveals that, in the convex mirror in the center of the composition, van Eyck's discreet reflection is visible.

BRON

[leevc]

Claude Cahun: Lucy Schwob was a writer, actress, and outspoken member of the Parisian lesbian community between the two world wars. She and Suzanne Malherbe, her stepsister, became partners in life, love, and art, and took the ambiguously gendered pseudonyms Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore for their collaborative theatrical and photographic works. The images they made mostly depict Cahun, and sometimes Moore, in a variety of masculine, androgynous, and feminine personas set in minimally staged scenes in their home.

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never be finished removing all these faces.” –Claude Cahun

Claude Cahun, Self-Portrait, 1928.

Claude Cahun, May 1945 (with German military pin) after the liberation of Jersey.

[leevc]

Yasumasa Morimura (born 1951, Osaka, Japan) has been working as a conceptual photographer and filmmaker for more than three decades. Through extensive use of props, costumes, makeup, and digital manipulation, the artist masterfully transforms himself into recognizable subjects, often from the Western cultural canon. Morimura has based works on seminal paintings by Frida Kahlo, Vincent Van Gogh, and Diego Velázquez, as well as images culled from historical materials, mass media, and popular culture. The artist’s reinvention of iconic photographs and art historical masterpieces challenges the associations the viewer has with the subjects, while also commenting on Japan’s complex absorption of Western culture. Through his depiction of female stars and characters, Morimura subverts the concept of the “male gaze”; within each image he both challenges the authority of identity and overturns the traditional scope of self-portraiture.

Self-Portraits through Art History (Magritte / Triple Personality), 2016

BRON

[leevc]

Pierre Molinier (b. 1900, Agen, France - 1976, Bordeaux, France) was a surrealist painter, photographer and 'object maker' who worked alongside the Surrealists, including Andre Breton who organised his only solo show in his lifetime at L'Etoile Scellee (1957).

Embodying an androgynous identity (cross-dressing in his wife's lingerie) and through his fetishistic erotic portraiture, he challenged norms of morality and decency, as in the self-portrait series Mon cul. Before committing suicide, he declared his death and raised his tomb against the social conventions of morality, glory and honour.

He committed suicide in 1976, and a retrospective at Centre Georges Pompidou was held the following year.

AUTOPORTRAIT À LÉPERON D'AMOUR

BRON

[leevc]

SAMUEL FOSSO: One of Central Africa’s leading contemporary artists, photographer Samuel Fosso forged his path as an artist almost accidentally, an unexpected result of his work as a commercial portrait photographer. His experience in this field eventually inspired the conceptual self-portraiture for which he is known, a body of work through which he engages with the history of studio-based photography in Africa while forging a distinct aesthetic that celebrates and challenges concepts of Pan-African identity.

At the age of 13, Fosso set up a commercial studio in Bangui, in the Central African Republic (CAR). He had grown up in Biafra, a territory in southeastern Nigeria that, following years of internal ethnic struggles, declared its independence in 1967. The bitter civil war that ensued incited Fosso to flee to the CAR, where an uncle took him in.

Having established a successful studio business, Fosso found that his clients preferred a quick turnaround on their portraits. This demand provided him with a chance entry into art making: in order to use up leftover film and process it for printing at the end of the day, he began taking pictures of himself, sending these to family back in Nigeria. His early self-portraits demonstrate an intrinsic interest in studied self-presentation: against makeshift backdrops, he experiments confidently with props, poses, and costumes. Defying dictatorial statutes banning bell bottoms and platform boots, he often defiantly luxuriates in these flamboyant 1970s fashions.

Samuel Fosso - Self-portrait, 1976

BRON

[leevc]

Ichiwo Sugino (born 1965), a retired advertising designer whose efforts may point to the future of camerawork: the vast outsider realm of online. In 2015 Sugino began posting impersonations of mostly 20th-century cultural figures — all male — on his Instagram account. He achieves these likenesses mainly by altering his face with adhesive tape and other props as needed. His subjects include Alfred Hitchcock, John Lennon, Marlon Brando as the Godfather and Che Guevara. Their faces scroll past on what looks like a giant cellphone screen, making it easy to contrast the images’ startling accuracy with their ingeniously slapdash method. This may be Online Brut, as well as a spoof of the fastidious transformations, also for the camera, of his fellow Japanese artist, Yasumasa Morimura.

Ichiwo Sugino’s transformation as Alfred Hitchcock, posted on the artist’s Instagram account.

Bron

[leevc]

Ming Wong

Lerne Deutsch mit Petra von Kant / Learn German with Petra von Kant

installation 10:00 mins loop 2007

This work was developed by the artist as part of a personal, self-designed German language and cultural immersion programme, while he was preparing to relocate to Berlin in August 2007.

Believing that one of the best ways to get insight into a foreign culture is through the films of that country, the artist has adopted one of his favourite German films as his guide, The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, about a successful but arrogant fashion designer in her mid-thirties, who falls into despair when she loses the woman she loves.

Putting himself in the mould of German actress Margit Carstensen as Petra Von Kant – a role for which she won several awards – the artist attempts to articulate himself through as wide a range of emotions as displayed by the actress in the climactic scene from the film, where our tragic lovesick anti-heroine goes through a hysterical disintegration.

With this work the artist rehearses going through the motions and emotions and articulating the words for situations that he believes he may encounter when he moves to Berlin as a post-35-year-old, single, gay, ethnic-minority mid-career artist – i.e. feeling bitter, desperate, or washed up. (“Ich bin im Arsch”)

With these tools, he will be armed with the right words and modes of expressions to communicate his feelings effectively to his potential German compatriots.

BRON