ME
John Bock, Eber­hard Havekost, Alicja Kwade, Mark Leckey, Nam June Paik, Pamela Rosenkranz, Rose­marie Trockel, Erwin Wurm, Sarah Lucas, Vito Acconci, Jonathan Monk, Josh Smith, Jack Pierson, Thorsten Brinkmann

What does one expect from a picture that is supposed to be a self-portrait? Strictly speaking, the ingre­di­ents are clear-cut. They have been tried and tested for centuries. Artists explore their faces in the mirror and render this expe­ri­ence in a portrait. The modern era spawned count­less self-portraitists from whom nothing less than naked self-affir­ma­tion was to be expected in their explo­ration of their self. And today? Artists no longer show their faces to the viewer. They leave self-reve­la­tion behind, retreat from view, pursue less direct approaches—and distance them­selves from their own self. We often only know that these are self-portraits because the titles tell us so: Imi Knoebel presents a collec­tion of uten­sils as a “Selb­st­porträt mit Papp­karton”, and Gabriel Kuri a combi­na­tion of insu­lating mate­rial and a shell. Abraham Cruzvil­legas renders personal docu­ments unread­able by over­painting them and calls it a “blind self-portrait,” while instead of portraits, Ryan Gander shows the palettes he allegedly used to paint them. Günther Förg portrays himself descending a stairway without a head, Wolf­gang Till­mans shows only his knee, Pawel Althamer nothing but his clothes.