Photo By Gail
In an effort to create an anonymous Self-Portrait (1923), artist Charles Sheeler (1883 – 1965) portrays himself as a barely perceptible, shadowy presents, reflected in a window left of center. Positioned in front of him is a telephone, a modern technology at the time, rendered with meticulous detail emphasizing its sleek, industrial design, which functions is a substitute or surrogate self.
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Photo By Gail
For Me as Warhol in Drag with Scar (2010) Gillian Wearing combined elements from two famous photo shoots of artist Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987): a 1981image of the artist in drag by Christopher Makos, and a visceral 1968 shot by Richard Avedon of Warhol displaying the freshly healed wounds to his torso resulting from a recent attempt on his life
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Gillian Wearing, Me as Warhol in Drag with Scar
Photo By Gail
Raqib Shaw (b. 1974) uses the creative process to tell his personal story, raising questions around the construct of identity. The imagined setting of The Final Submission in Fire on Ice (2021), a self-portrait, combines elements of the artist’s London studio, and the landscape of his childhood home in Kashmir, India, from where he was uprooted as a teenager due to political unrest.
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Photo By Gail Worley
In this oil painting from 2021, Gillian Wearing expands on her Lockdown self-portraits by inserting herself into a 1877 painting by the French artist, Henri Fantin-Latour (1836 to 1904) entitled La Lecture (The Reading). The original painting depicts two women in a domestic setting, one of whom reads aloud from a book, while the other sits beside her listening. In her version, Wearing takes the place of the listener, but crops the image, shifting the focus from the act of reading to the relationship between the two figures. As in her Spiritual Family photographic series, Wearing assumes the identity of a historical figure, but here she plays the role of a subject rather than an artist. Carefully studying her female companion, she imagines herself in a time and place that limited women’s social lives to private spaces – not unlike those featured in Lockdown.
Photographed in the Guggenheim Museum in NYC.
Photo By Gail
Paraskeva Clark  (1898 – 1986) came to Toronto via Paris as a Russian émigré, arriving in 1931. Having experienced the 1917 Russian revolution firsthand, she never forgot its terrors or its utopian promise. Once in Canada, she remain committed to her homeland. In 1942, the year in which she painted Self Portrait With a Concert Program, her country was under siege during the Second World War.  At that time, she held a sale of her paintings in support of the Canadian Aid to Russia Fund. In this painting, she incorporates the paper program from a concert of Russian music into the surface of her work, her gaze meeting ours with wary pride.
Photographed in the Vancouver Art Museum in Vancouver BC.