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Louisiana Museum presents Self-Portrait exhibition

Louisiana Museum presents Self-Portrait, an exhibition on view through January 13. 2013.

Louisiana’s exhibition Self-Portrait focus on the self-portrait as genre through-out the 20th and 21st century, as shown by 150 works by 64 international artists from early modernism till today. How does one represent oneself? And what are the connections between self-portraiture and self-representation? Can a self-portrait be an objective, neutral representation, or should it depict the complex mind, personality and life-conditions of the artist? Can a self-portrait at all portray a person’s composite identity? These are some of the question the exhibition raises, questions that extend beyond the artist’s own universe into the life of the viewer – and this is exactly the source of the fascination exerted by the multiplicity of works shown in the exhibition.

The self-portrait is a classic, well-tried but also intense and almost raw-skinned genre that has involved a wide range of idioms throughout the history of art. The exhibition is showing works from the 20th century and tells the story of the transformations of self-portrayal over time. As a genre the self-portrait has undergone radical developments, and often it results not only in images of the artist’s idea of his or her own identity, but just as much in partial images of our time, of how we see ourselves in general.

The exhibition, which is on show in the South Wing of the Museum, is based on a wide selection of artists, all of whom have worked naturalistically in their oeuvres with the self-portrait as genre. The 150 works in the exhibition are divided into nine categories based on thematic motif rather than chronology. – www.louisiana.dk