PRESENTATION: Self-Portraits

The group exhibition “Self-Portraits” takes place in parallel across GRIMM’s galleries in Amsterdam and New York. The exhibition draws together a group of 22 international artists with the provocation to create a self-portrait in the classical sense: a window into the soul of the maker for the viewer to experience. Featuring artists from across GRIMM’s network and beyond, the exhibition presents a challenge to this selection of acclaimed contemporary artists to apply their distinctive style to the framework of self-portraiture.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: GRIMM Gallery Archive

The self-portraits presented across GRIMM’s New York and Amsterdam spaces are direct, lively, intimate, and authentic, true to our contemporary confessional age. Taking a classical, painterly approach, as opposed to the ‘anything goes’ trend from the 1980s to the 2000s, when performance, video, and photography dominated the genre, and where the self-portrait seemed to focus on sound, the body (or part thereof), or a comment on a general metaphysical state, the works included here are the result of painters looking directly at themselves and depicting what they see. For some artists, the exhibition marks their first self-portrait; Matthias Weischer and Alex Dordoy among them. Others, such as Philip Akkerman, have made a career out of limiting their practice to only painting self-portraits.  The exhibition aims to capture a ‘state of being’ at this specific moment in time for each artist. In the era of the ‘selfie’, taken on a daily basis by millions to present a veneer of success, experience, beauty, or aspiration – the true sense of ’self’ can be overlooked or masked. The self-portrait offers the potential to reflect not only the surface but also the psychological interior of the artist, adapting to each artist’s distinctive voice. A group exhibition about self-portraiture in 2024, featuring young and mid-career artists engaging with this centuries-old practice of self-reflection and contemplation seems apt, provocative, and challenging. Philip Akkerman has focused his oeuvre exclusively on exploration of the self-portrait since 1981. In producing images of himself, he employs and experiments with a vast range of painterly techniques informed by the history of art, especially Old Master painting. Ranging in style from hyperrealism to abstraction, Akkerman’s portraits confront the enigma of existence and use painting as a means of comprehending. With over 4,000 portraits to date, Akkerman effectively treats his portraits as though they are a diary, focusing on the exploration of his own psychological state rather than accurately rendering physicality. Charles Avery views his work as being divided into two areas; atomic and mystic. His ‘atomic’ works are abstract and geometrical and his ‘mystic’ works consist of figurative pencil drawings. Avery prefers to exhibit them together in order to explore questions raised in metaphysics, mathematics and philosophy. He is particularly interested in the work of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, from whom he took the idea of an atomic and mystic approach to art. Avery’s drawings are made entirely from his imagination, and although they appear to be part of a larger, unknown narrative, they are completely improvised. The act of painting for Gabriella Boyd is an act of translation, from the interior or verbal, into the exterior and visual. As psychological and literal spaces collide, Boyd explores and collapses the distinction between interior and exterior states by bringing together representational motifs with purely symbolic structures or diagrammatic forms. In an attempt to depict embodied experience and memory, painting enables the approximation of sentiment or language, allowing invisible sources of power and energy to flourish in indefinite but sincere, candid vocabularies.

Anthony Cudahy weaves imagery culled from photo archives, art history, film stills, hagiographic icons and personal photographs to explore themes of queer identity and tenderness. His evocative figurative paintings and drawings are informed by extensive historical research. Moving through a variety of iterations from these vignettes, he generates compositions through acute attention to color and mark-making, sustaining a commitment to the mediums he uses as they guide the final works. They negotiate feelings of loneliness, isolation, desire, and safety through the lens of the artist’s own autobiographical narratives and crafted mythologies. Alex Dordoy explores ideas of artificiality, nostalgia, and the role of technology in image-making. The unearthly scenes and objects depicted in Dordoy’s paintings reference Art Nouveau advertisements and designs, awakening the symbolic potential of their imagery. The artist edits and manipulates his source imagery using Photoshop and paints the resulting compositions, returning these representations to the physical realm. Louise Giovanelli’s work turns on charged atmospheres and suggestive details, in which light, having been transmuted into paint, attains a dense, glinting physicality. Drawing her imagery from sources as diverse as Renaissance art, vintage film stills, and contemporary popular entertainers, her intensely worked canvases often focus on the staging of rituals and performances (religious, theatrical, social), while their jewelled palette and shallow pictorial space compels us to linger on their surfaces, slowing down the act of looking to something close to a meditative encounter. Tommy Harrison’s work is preoccupied with the process of constructing and collapsing the painted image. Demonstrating a highly sophisticated range of techniques and influences, the artist’s work draws on various painterly traditions from the High Renaissance to the present day. Each work is ultimately concerned with the technical journey that is taken to arrive at a composition, built up through an unfolding process over several months, beginning with geometric forms that lead to a range of possible outcomes before being resolved into dark, mysterious landscapes and uncanny interiors. Nathanaëlle Herbelin uses painting as a means of reflection upon her mixed cultural heritage. Born to a French father and an Israeli mother, her works offer subtle hints into her world of delicately captured memories. She employs recurring patterns, an earth toned palette and loose brushwork that evokes the work of Les Nabis, a prominent group of young painters based in Paris in the late 19th century. In particular, her penchant for rendering domestic scenes demonstrates the influence of Impressionist painters such as Pierre Bonnard, Édouard Vuillard, or Félix Vallotton. Neo Matloga tends to depict his subjects as hybrids whose faces are formed by collaging together photographic images of friends, family, and famous South African figures from politics and the arts. His self-portraits are representations of himself and his mood, rather than renderings of his actual appearance. His monochromatic works play with surrealism and perspective, pushing light, shadow and line to the edge of abstraction.

Rosalind Nashashibi is a British-Palestinian painter and filmmaker, whose works often permeate into the next one, creating an ongoing dialogue between participants and bodies of work. Nashashibi’s oeuvre is imbued with precise references to the works of other filmmakers and painters— such as references to David Hockney, Pierre Bonnard and the filmmakers Alexander Kluge and Chantal Akerman. Polina Pak’s work seeks to identify places of comfort that can be found in times of distress. She is drawn to the mundane elements in domestic spaces and the study of miscellaneous objects. In doing so, she chooses to highlight what we might find comfort in and draws attention to fixtures in our daily lives that might otherwise be overlooked. Pak employs distinctly tight brushwork and draws inspiration from Magic Realist painters of the 1920s, in particular Odilon Redon. The figures in Emil Sands’ paintings often exchange lonely glances along shallow waters and deep blue skies. Warm bodies pass through a liminal space between day and night, moving through states of masculinity and vulnerability. His personal essay “Struck on one Side,” which focused on his experience growing up with cerebral palsy, was published in the March 2023 edition of The Atlantic magazine, along with his paintings. He is currently working on extending the piece into a memoir. Benjamin Sasserson maintains a nearly nocturnal work schedule and prefers to paint at the dead of night. He relies on a deeply toned palette and draws inspiration from the forests surrounding his hometown, Odense, Denmark. A longtime follower of Vilhelm Hammershøi, Sasserson is particularly influenced by his fellow Danish painter’s seamless ability for depicting chiaroscuro with the sparsity of only candlelight. Like Hammershøi, Benjamin works on each painting for long stretches of time, prioritizing technique and visual effect. Drawing on dreams and memories imbued with an architectural sense of depth and balance, Rafał Topolewski’s work captures the liminal space between waking and sleeping. Barbed botanical subjects creep across the canvas, clock faces dissolve into landscapes, and vacant, glassy-eyed faces evoke the disjointed logic of the dream, balancing abstraction with a deft figurative approach. This fusion of fragmented objects with a softly muted palette and hazy, stippled brushstrokes creates the uncanny atmosphere unique to Topolewski’s work. As a Dutch painter, Hannah van Bart draws inspiration from her nation’s rich legacy of portraiture to offer an imaginative, contemporary reinterpretation of the genre. Her works exist in the liminal space between abstraction and figuration, allowing her to cultivate a visual language that privileges sensation over reality. Self-described as ‘imaginary portraits’, Van Bart’s characters meet the viewer with unsettling, penetrating gazes, underpinning her canvases with a psychological charge that verges on familiarity. Across her oeuvre, human and animal hybrid figures emerge from scumbled, monochromatic hazes or become enveloped by repeating patterns. Where a stare may intimate connection, the common absence of setting evokes a surreal feeling of timelessness and ambiguity. Through the marriage of memory and imagination, her figures imply a narrative that extends beyond the canvas. By inviting individual interpretations, they are rendered inherently personal.

Volker Hüller creates dynamic canvases writhing with geometric forms, inviting viewers into a rich tapestry of interconnecting narratives. Upon close observation, the abstracted and fragmented surfaces unveil motifs of corporeality, as hands and facial features subtly materialize amidst the fractals. The influence of modernist movements such as Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism coalesce in his oeuvre, integrating historical styles to create compositions that attest to the complexities of contemporary existence. Through masterful balance between the formal elements of shape, color, and texture, the initial chaos of the canvases dissipates and produces a distinct atmosphere that invites the viewer’s engagement. Having earned her Diploma from the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts, Christine Safa’s practice has diverged from the politicized scenes of Middle Eastern conflict that were encouraged during her education. In her current practice, Safa visually explores her personal connection to her cultural roots through the genre of portraiture. Her warm, earthen palette evokes the Mediterranean tones associated with her Lebanese heritage, as curved figures become indistinguishable from mountainous terrain. Contemplative and solitary, her portraits are infused with intimacy and melancholy. Anj Smith is a leading British contemporary artist whose painterly practice explores themes of gender and ecological anxiety. Ranging from sparse, devastated wastelands to intricately detailed, anthropomorphic portraits, Smith suffuses her canvases with a palpable sense of anxiety. In her work, there exists no linear narrative or didactic reading. Instead, she invites viewers to contemplate the fragile relationship between humanity and the natural world. Smith’s self-portrait chosen for this exhibition invokes the folklore of the animal familiar, the monkey acting as the spiritual guardian charged with her protection. The ape’s stark crimson eyes are mirrored on her own visage, emphasizing their distinct similarity. By stressing this interconnectedness with the environment, her paintings become a vessel for introspection and activism. Through her chosen medium, Smith confronts the problematic history of painting and interrogates its relevance in the contemporary world. Her canvases resist traditional categorisation by condensing the genres of landscape, portraiture, and still life, while also interrogating her personal relationship to art history and her place as a woman within it. Often depicting domestic scenes both interior and exterior, Jonathan Wateridge’s canvases evoke a duality of familiarity and strangeness. In recent years, Wateridge has refined his visual language, presenting a distinctive vision that transcends the corporeal. In contrast to his earlier works, where figures stood prominently in domestic settings, his current ghostlike figures serve as conduits for exploring universal feelings of isolation and uncertainty. These atomized and translucent beings are seamlessly absorbed into their environments, inviting contemplation on the relationship between man and his surroundings. Throughout his career, Matthias Weischer has explored the illusory potential of pictorial space through multiple perspectives. He uses the domestic realm as a framework to enhance the viewer’s experience of the interior as a stage for symbolic objects, while his thick application of paint speaks to a practice rich with conceptual and material exploration. Arisa Yoshioka grew up between Mongolia and Japan. She spent her childhood in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, which until 1990 was a satellite state of the Soviet Union, and moved to Tokyo before graduating high school. Yoshioka began painting in 2021 and subsequently moved to New York. Yoshioka’s work is deeply informed by dreams, which the artist perceives as fragments of memory. Throughout her paintings, she reassembles these fragments, using a subdued palette and variegated brushwork. Her technique and approach to composition evokes the work of Post-Impressionist painters, such as Édouard Vuillard and Pierre Bonnard. Yoshioka is particularly interested in rendering patterns, which allude to early Tibetan Thangka tapestries. Working primarily in oil on linen or burlap, her collaged construction of spaces also poses an allusion to the Surrealists.

Participating Artists New York: Philip Akkerman, Charles Avery, Gabriella Boyd, Anthony Cudahy, Alex Dordoy, Louise Giovanelli, Tommy Harrison, Nathanaëlle Herbelin, Neo Matloga, Rosalind Nashashibi, Polina Pak, Emil Sands, Benjamin Sasserson, and Rafał Topolewski. Participating Artists Amsterdam: Hannah van Bart, Volker Hüller, Nathaniel Oliver, Christine Safa, Anj Smith, Jonathan Wateridge, Matthias Weischer, and Arisa Yoshioka

Photo: Tommy Harrison, Twins, 2024, Oil on canvas, 80 x 110 cm | 31 1/2 x 43 1/4 in, Courtesy the artist and GRIM Gallery

Info: GRIMM Gallery, 54 White Street, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 5/4-4/5/2024, Days & Hours: Wed-Sat 11:00-18:00 & GRIMM Gallery, Keizersgracht 241, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, Duration: 13/4-25/5/2024, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, https://grimmgallery.com/