Self-Conscious: Contemporary Portraiture

18 May - 23 June 2011
Switchback Gallery
Gippsland Centre for Art & Design, Monash University
Curator: Kirrily Hammond
 
Portraiture allows us to dwell on one of the most fascinating subjects - ourselves. The act of self reflection, and the study of others, can be fraught, humorous and enlightening, whilst also revealing artistic processes and modes of philosophical address, laid bare in the work of art.

Featuring a range of works drawn frmo the Monash University Collection, this exhibition explores the many ways in which artists approach contemporary portraiture and represent different modes of identity.

Artists:

Mutlu Çerkez, Simryn Gill, Matthew Griffin, Ronnie van Hout, James Lynch, Linda Marrinon, Fiona McMonagle, Mike Parr, David Rosetzky, Eliza Hutchison 

Public programs:

Curator's talk, Wednesday 18 May 2011 at 4.30pm, Switchback Gallery
 
See also:

Exhibition opening address by Rodney Forbes:

Selected from the Monash University collection by Kirrily Hammond, it explores portraiture as a genre in contemporary Australian art. Australians are fascinated by portraiture – the popularity of the Archibald prize is evidence of that enduring interest and maybe that comes from Australians’ love of individualism.

Last year I read an exquisite book, titled Man with a Blue Scarf by the British writer Martin Gayford. It’s an account of having his portrait painted, over many months by the veteran British painter Lucian Freud. In it, he muses on what a portrait sets out to do:

The portrait is a variety of art that has developed in western art over five millennia since the age of the pyramids. Its subject is the individuality of a particular person: the sitter. So in a sense, a portrait is all about the model. But of course it is also an expression of the mind, sensibility and skills of its creator: the artist. …. Then again, perhaps the true subject of a portrait is the interchange between (artist) and subject – what the sitter consciously or unconsciously reveals, and the artist picks up. Out of the sittings comes, with luck, a new entity: a (work) that succeeds and fails – that is, lives on in human memory or disappears – according to its power as a work of art. [1]

So portraiture is a conversation. And it draws on a deep hardwired tendency we have to recognise familiar faces or read the signs in unfamiliar ones. In recent years we have developed technology to do some of this work for us. Gayford writes about the genesis of facial recognition technology:

In the late 1980s, Alexander Pentland, a scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media lab worked on a project for the identification and analysis of the human visage by computer. He isolated one hundred different component portions of the face, dubbed ‘eigenfaces’ from the German word eigen, meaning ‘individual’. Some of these zones of facial territory are more obvious than others. The upper lip….constitutes one of the hundred; others consist of more varied chunks of cheek and jaw. According to Pentland’s study, each of these hundred pieces in the physiognomic mosaic can vary in a hundred ways….the total range of possible variations in the human features….equal 100 to the power of 200….a number considerably greater than the number of subatomic particles in the universe. Furthermore, this terrain of the face is one to which human beings are attuned to an astonishing extent. Dedicated areas of the brain are devoted to the recognition of faces and the decoding of their expressions….so much so that we look with fascination at the faces of people we do not know, dead for hundreds of years, who are often no more than a name. [2]

This exhibition provides a fascinating overview of contemporary approaches to this magical process of portraiture. Look at the range of approaches. It’s a cliché of portrait painting that portraitists always depict themselves. In her illuminating title notes Kirrily Hammond points out that Ronnie van Hout’s sculptures are childlike doppelgangers of the artist.

Conversely Mike Parr’s sculpture speaks of the impossibility of truly representing oneself

Portraitists often put their subjects under stress rather than at ease, so as to get past their ‘public’ face. Photographer Eliza Hutchinson does so by suspending them upside down, giving a new meaning to a portrait with gravity.

Sometimes the portrait is reflecting what the sitter thinks of the artist. James Lynch’s videos do something I would love to paint – recreating other peoples’ dreams where he has been told he featured.

Linda Marrinon’s feisty koala (in one of my favourite Australian paintings) grapples with the artist’s nose in the same way that portrait painters wrestle with that crucial appendage.

Each work makes a statement about its subject, but also about how we see others and want to be seen.
 
 
[1] Gayford, Martin; Man with a Blue Scarf, Thames and Hudson, London, 2010, p 20
[2] ibid p 93