STILL LIFE PORTRAIT / Judyta Bernaś, Izabela Gustowska, Paweł Mendrek, Krystyna Piotrowska, Alex Urso

STILL LIFE PORTRAIT

Judyta Bernaś
Izabela Gustowska
Paweł Mendrek
Krystyna Piotrowska
Alex Urso

Curator: Roman Lewandowski

Opening:
12.04.2018 | 6 pm
Centre for Creative Activities / ul. Gen. Zaruskiego 1a /Ustka

Exhibition:
13.01 – 1.07.2018

Small Gallery / ul. Partyzantów 31a / Słupsk
Centre for Creative Activities / ul. Gen. Zaruskiego 1a /Ustka

 

The exhibition features both the history and future potential of the portrait. Influenced by the emancipation and evolution in the art of Renaissance, this genre has become the most popular iconic form, and thanks to Buzz Aldrin’s selfie in space, it is sometimes perceived as “an image out of this earth”.

The portrait is one of the most spectacular mechanisms used to reconstruct and reconfigure any identity project, which – according to Pierre Bourdieu – is always constituted in the face of a wider social environment – one which has its own history and offers a certain set of acquired features and dispositions at both group and individual levels. Therefore, there is no doubt that the modern portrait can be perceived – as suggested by Hans Belting – as a “mask of memory and as a mask of social identity”. It is particularly noteworthy that the Greek antiquity used the same term – persona – to describe both the mask and the face, with autoprosopos being the real mask, and prosopeion an artificial one. Conversely, Roman Latin distinguished the “face” and “mask”. In the Renaissance theatre, the mask as such was nonexistent, and yet the era is regarded as the birth of an early-modern portrait, which according to Belting was a “protest against the cemetery” – by the time the first portraits were created, most people had been buried in anonymous graves. On the other hand, as the German historian notes, “the Portrait is an image of an image, because it reproduces the face which, in its part, is the image of ourselves.” It is worth noting that the first portraitists included Rembrandt van Rijn and Frans Hals. In subsequent eras, Vincent van Gogh and Andy Warhol were equally valued. Throughout the 20th century – along with the development of abstract art and the emergence of conceptual thinking about the work – the portrait experienced rather turbulent periods of ups and downs. It should be remembered that this coincided with the postmodernist questioning of the subject and the relativisation of the concept of identity, which to some extent – was paradoxically revealed by hyper-realistic painting. Nowadays, an artist can use the portrait to express a whole gamut of problems – from the strictly aesthetic and formal themes, through the issues of semantics and the semiotics of the work, to the ontology of art. The portrait can articulate very specific knowledge or confabulation around the biography and the author’s “psyche”, and at the same time, it can refer to the social or even political context (using the equivalents of sexual, gender or racial differences). And yet, equally famous are some of the portraits which actually portray “nobody”, instead referring to the “inability” of all representations. They revolve around the crisis of performance and repudiate the existing iconic cliches.