Self-Portraits
Skarstedt Paris
February 13 – March 29, 2025
Skarstedt Paris presents Self-Portraits, an exhibition that delves into the multifaceted nature of self-portraiture, exploring its significance as a means of self-expression throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether rendered in traditional or groundbreaking modes, each work on view delves into the paradoxes, nuances, and idiosyncrasies that make each identity unique, thereby connecting the artist’s individual ethos with universal values and themes.
Across the exhibition, the boundaries of self-representation dissolve into bold experimentation, where themes of transformation, temporality, and vulnerability intertwine. Jean Dubuffet’s Self-portrait from 1966, one of the six he ever made, would become the cover image of the Pompidou retrospective in 2001. It is part of the L’Hourloupe series, a cycle that sets a creative protocol between 1962 to 1974, a veritable exploration of a new language that touches on all artistic spheres explored by the French artist. Using sinuous, labyrinthine graphics, Jean Dubuffet composed schematic spaces like constructs of the mind. The surreal and the introspective converge in André Masson’s Le Voyant - Ville Crânienne (1940), a poetic synthesis of ink and gouache that evokes the fractured nature of identity as seen through a surrealist lens. The self emerges as both seer and subject, a fragment of the subconscious shaped by unseen forces. This notion of transformation continues in the conceptual play of Cindy Sherman, whose Untitled Film Still #24 (1978) disrupts the idea of self-portraiture as truth-telling. By embodying various personas through costumes and cinematic framing, Cindy Sherman dissolves herself into archetypes, exposing the performative masks society demands and the fluidity of personal identity. Martin Kippenberger's Untitled (1992), part of his series of Hand Painted Pictures, interrogates the conventions of self-portraiture by embracing irony and subversion, presenting the artist's identity as a fractured, performative construct. Through a deliberate amalgamation of self-deprecation and painterly virtuosity, Martin Kippenberger critiques the commodification of the artist's persona while questioning the authenticity of self-representation itself.
Georg Baselitz, by inverting his figure in Der Anfang ist der Abgang (The Beginning is the Departure) (2017), offers a meditation on the destabilization of the self. His deliberate subversion of form mirrors the psychological disorientation of self-reflection, confronting mortality and the inexorable passage of time. Similarly concerned with the interiority of human experience, Eric Fischl invites viewers into a deeply introspective yet playful meditation on the act of self-representation in Cat ‘n Hat (2024). By positioning himself in a jester’s hat, Eric Fischl underscores the inherent absurdity of the artist’s role—laying oneself bare before an audience through the act of painting. This duality, at once vulnerable and self-aware, reflects the paradox of creation as both an intimate exposure and a performative gesture, where humor becomes a defense against the weight of self-examination.
More than fifty years earlier, Pablo Picasso articulated his anxieties regarding his place within the art historical canon through works such as Buste d’Homme (1964), produced during a prolific period of introspective self-portraits that utilize a pared-down style to express the urgency of his feeling in his later years that he had “less and less time, and…more and more to say.”[1] Similarly, Francis Bacon’s late Study for Self-Portrait (1979) uses intense light and shadow to highlight the creases along his forehead and other visible signs of age, investigating himself as a means of simultaneously investigating the human condition, traumas, and violence. Turning to self-portraiture “because [he] had nobody else left to paint,”[2] this intimately-scaled work questions at what degree of distortion the work can still be a representation of the self. Juan Gris’s Autoportrait (1911-1912), rendered in the language of Cubism, deconstructs and reassembles the figure into facets of geometry. The fractured planes not only speak to the multiplicity of the self but also to the structural interplay between form and meaning in modernist art.
The tactile intensity of Frank Auerbach’s layered compositions further complicates notions of self. His visceral approach to works like Self-Portrait II (2024) transforms the portrait into a locus of memory, each mark carrying the weight of time’s erosion on identity. Similarly, Chantal Joffe’s vibrant palette and bold brushwork in a new painting imbue her portrayals with a raw immediacy and a diaristic quality that captures the precarious balance between strength and fragility, echoing themes of femininity, motherhood, and self-examination. Louis Fratino likewise fills his canvases with a quiet familiarity, using the queer body as a mirror for the vastness of memory and emotional expression. Throughout the 1980s, Robert Mapplethorpe also reflected his commitment to themes of gender expression. In Self-Portrait (1980), we find him draped in a luxurious fur coat, exuding an elegance in the style of Rrose Sélavy, Marcel Duchamp’s alter ego, whose playful fluidity of gender and self-reinvention are echoed by Mapplethorpe in a manner that suggests Robert Mapplethorpe’s rejection of traditional binary definitions of gender.
Through the subversive materiality of grease and pigment, David Hammons challenges the very medium of portraiture. His Untitled (circa 1970) resists conventional depictions of identity, offering instead an enigmatic interplay of texture and absence that critiques cultural and societal narratives, particularly as they relate to race in America. In making his body both the image and material of the work, David Hammons literally gives his viewers a reflection of his experience as a Black man in America. These themes continue in Untitled (SAMO) (1981) by Jean-Michel Basquiat. With its economy of means, Jean-Michel Basquiat conveys the reality of his place in American society and the visceral emotions that accompany it. His refusal to depict his true likeness in preference of a mask-like figure gets to the heart of self-portraiture’s role as a personal mode through which to explore identity, culture, and posit one’s own social commentaries. In making himself appear almost as an African mask, his experiences as a man of color in 1980s America act as proxy for the universal experiences of others like him.
Together, these artists reveal the self as a site of tension and transformation—a space where cultural, personal, and artistic identities collide and evolve. The works in Self-Portraits invite viewers to explore the shifting terrain of representation, where each artist unearths the essence of individuality within the universal human experience.
[1] Pablo Picasso quoted in Marie-Laure Bernadac, Late Picasso: Paintings, sculpture, drawings, prints 1953-1972 (London: Tate Publishing, 1988), 85.
[2] Francis Bacon, quoted in David Sylvester, Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames & Hudson, 2016), 150.
SKARSTEDT PARIS
2 Avenue Matignon, 75008 Paris
