Look at Me!

The exhibition Look At Me! Portraits and Other Fictions from the ”la Caixa” Contemporary Art Collection examined portraiture, one of the oldest artistic genres, through a significant number of works of our times.

Fidelity and likeness to the portrayed subject have been an essential condition of portraits, although art has taught us that to portray is not to reproduce but to create an image and, in short, construct a fiction. Most of the works assembled here examine concepts of truth, appearance and representation, besides memory and fiction. Some put the normative canons of portraiture to the test, revealing its ruses and the conventions of society. Painting exposes masks and make-up, whereas photography experiments with the potential of fiction to produce disconcerting effects of reality.

The exhibition catalogue includes an introduction by Elisa Duran, director of the “la Caixa” Foundation, and articles written by Nimfa Bisbe Molin, director of the foundation’s Contemporary Art Collection and the exhibition curator, and Virginia Torrente and Lorena Amorós. The catalogue features the works of 22 international artists who raise the question as to how we interpret ourselves as an image. The artists in the catalogue are Janine Antoni, Eduardo Arroyo, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christian Boltanski, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Esther Ferrer, Günther Förg, Curro González, Stefan Hablützel, Roni Horn, Sharon Lockhart, Pedro Mora, Vik Muniz, Óscar Muñoz, Bruce Nauman, Carlos Pazos, Cindy Sherman, Antoni Tàpies, Gillian Wearing and Sue Williams.

Publication date: 2017
Pages: 108
ISBN: 978-605-4642-75-5