I've Seen That Face Before:Visions of the Self at the Gagosian Gallery.

"I paint self-portraits because I am so often alone. I am the person I know best" - Frida Kahlo.

There was nothing by Frida Kahlo at the Gagosian's recent Visions of the Self:Rembrandt and Now exhibition but there were some pretty big name artists showing. Roy Lichtenstein, Lucian Freud, Gerhard Richter, Francis Bacon, Man Ray, and Georg Baselitz just for starters. Oh, and Rembrandt too of course. You can't put Rembrandt's name in a show and not have any of his work there. Surely?

In fact the whole show was based around the loan of Rembrandt's Self-Portrait with Two Circles (c.1665) from Kenwood which, the curators claim, gave them "a unique opportunity to reflect on the directions self-portraiture has taken in this century" before going on to waffle on about Sigmund Freud's investigations of the role of the unconscious in human behaviour, physiognomy as a clue to individual character, and the psychological intensity of the self-portrait.

Even if you don't buy into that stuff (and I do, some of it anyway) there are some great paintings on show here. I wrote about Basquiat's Barbican show back in 2017 and his 1986 painting, The Thinker, is one of many highlights on show at the Gagosian. If it's psychological intensity you're looking for this painting is bursting with it and the clues to individual character suggest a man exploding inside with ideas, anxieties, and passion. A bit like me really!

Jean-Michel Basquiat - The Thinker (1986)

Howard Hodgkin - Portrait of the Artist (1984-1987)

Giuseppe Penone - Roversciare i propri occhi (1970)

Elsewhere the idea of the self-portrait stretches from the abstract and brightly coloured work of Howard Hodgkin to the monochrome and almost, except the eyes, pictorially accurate work of Giuseppe Penone. I'm not sure if those blank eyes are supposed to be reflecting vacancy or monitoring us without emotion.

I love Glenn Brown's work (and wrote a fairly length piece about him back in March 2018) and even in a show with names as big as Pablo Picasso and Basquiat, Brown still holds his own. Is he saying his role as a painter is somehow akin to that of both a clown (the red nose) and a Shakespearean thespian (the ruff) or perhaps he's just saying that he's how he personally feels. Certainly the image doesn't scream Sex like its title does! 

Glenn Brown - Sex (2003)

Gerhard Richter - Hofkirche Dresden (Court Chapel Dresden) (2000)

Damien Hirst - With Dead Head (1991)

Gerhard Richter's first inclusion appears, initially, to be a photograph but it's an oil painting made intentionally to give the impression of a blurry snap. It's certainly much more big and clever than Damien Hirst's rather tiresome actual photograph of him posing with a dead head. If I'd devoted my body to medical science I don't think I'd want the young, or the older for the matter, Hirst larking around with my severed head. Maybe permission was given but to me it seems both distasteful and disrespectful.

Worse still, as a piece of art it's frankly pretty shit. Cindy Sherman's work finds much more favour in these quarters. She seems to actually say interesting things about identity, the male gaze, and female representation in the art world. Next to her a standard Georg Baselitz and a weak Lucian Freud (there's a better one in the show later) suffer in comparison.

Cindy Sherman - Untitled #220 (1990)

Georg Baselitz - Grosse Nacht (1962-1963)

Lucian Freud - Hand Mirror in a Chair (1966)

Nathaniel Mary Quinn - Self-Portrait After Rembrandt (2019)

Not that it's a competition. It's good to see relatively new and, to me at least, unknown artists like Nathaniel Mary Quinn up on the walls next to Freud and Egon Schiele. Quinn holds himself well in such elated company. I actually prefer his soft cubist Self-Portrait After Rembrandt to Schiele's gouache work but, to be fair, it was probably the best Schiele the curators could get.

Richard Prince's Instagram post that hopes to show us the nature of a person is their social media account these days is an interesting concept but comes off here as a bit of a novelty. Which is true of a fairly large amount of Jeff Koons' work. He's at least made an effort to fit in with the Rembrandt theme and the gazing ball looks pretty.

Egon Schiele -Self portrait (1910)

Richard Prince - Untitled (Portrait) (2019)

Jeff Koons - Gazing Ball (Rembrandt Self-Portrait Wearing a Hat) (2015)

Urs Fischer - Untitled (2011)

The work of both Urs Fischer and Rudolf Stingel could certainly not be said to be pretty but they're two of the best on show, both nearby and complementing each other like two daytime drinkers on separate tables in a soulless Wetherspoons pub, both showing a man who looks like he's probably had better times. 'Fischer' sits alone at a table pondering his existence while 'Stingel' looks utterly forlorn, the blurry way the image has been made up giving it almost the air of a crime scene shot.

There's a photo from Man Ray that's far from one of his most interesting and there's a slide projection by Ellen Gallagher showing Mr Freud, him again, at work that won't tell you anything you don't already know. Dora Maar knocks them both into a cocked hat. Long dismissed as a muse and lover of Picasso, her 1939 Portrait de femme shows she was no slouch herself. It may look like something a creative/unhinged kid may draw in the back of their exercise book to avoid studying hard during mathematics but that strengthens, rather than weakens, its appeal.

Rudolf Stingel - Untitled (2012)

Man Ray - Self Portrait (1924)

Ellen Gallagher - Odalisque (2013)

Dora Maar - Portrait de femme (autoportrait) (1939)

Glenn Brown - The Hurdy-Gurdy (2019)

Francis Bacon - Three Studies for a Portrait including a Self-Portrait (1967)

Jenny Saville - Untitled (2019)

There's another great Glenn Brown work, a Bacon triptych which is (of course) excellent, and, better than both of them there's Jenny Saville's 2019 untitled piece. I've loved Saville's work in the past and that love is ongoing. She seems a natural heir to the likes of Freud and Bacon and it was a neat trick placing her visceral portrait near to Lichtenstein's delightful abstract yellow and monochrome job.

They played off each other well. Not sure about Richter's Spiegel though. Who's that guy?

Roy Lichtenstein - Self-Portrait II (1976)

Gerhard Richter - Spiegel (2008)

Charles Ray - Male Mannequin (1990)

Yes, it's me and just in case you're wondering I was not the model for Charles Ray's Male Mannequin. But after all the faces on show it's easy to forget that bodies (and, indeed, it seems, cocks) can be part of self-portraiture too. Bold move by Ray. Wonder if he added a bit on or he's being honest?

Andy Warhol, famously, enjoyed the spotlight (though to the best of my knowledge kept his pants on in his self-portraits) and there's a couple of his here. One from the eighties, one from the sixties, that show you what his work was like. If you like Warhol, you'll probably like them. If you don't you won't learn a lot but Warhol was never about education.

Robert Mapplethorpe was not an artist shy of inserting a penis into his work or, of course, his body. The explicit nature of some of his photos earned me a three day Facebook ban once but his inclusion in this show is pretty tame in comparison. A trifle dull even.

Andy Warhol - Self-Portrait (1986)

Robert Mapplethorpe - Self-Portrait (1988)

Andy Warhol - Self-Portrait (1966-1967)

I'd enjoyed the show. It hadn't really told a coherent narrative about the development of the self-portrait in the last one hundred years though. Instead it had just shown lots of different ways that mostly well known, mostly very good artists had approached it. I signed out with a trademark Francis Bacon and, of course, the Rembrandt that kicked the whole thing off but for me, and I repeat I know it's not a competition, the works I enjoyed most were by Lichtenstein, Maar, Fischer, Stingel, Brown, Quinn, and, of course, Basquiat. 

If you want a realistic self-portrait of me read all of my 504 blogs from end to end. Or offer to paint me.

Francis Bacon - Self Portrait (1972)



Rembrandt - Self Portrait with Two Circles (c.1665)