Artists' portraits and self-portraits from the 16th century to the present day on display in Gorica

From May 28 to October 2, 2022 Palazzo Attems Petzenstein in Gorizia presents the exhibition Reflections. Self-Portraits in the Mirror of History, curated by Johannes Ramharter and Raffaella Sgubin with the collaboration of Lorenzo Michelli and Vanja Strukelj. About seventy works, most of them from prestigious Austrian institutions, dedicated to portraiture andself-portraiture in painting from the mid-sixteenth century to the contemporary will be on display.

The exhibition is part of the larger exhibition project focusing on the theme of self-portraiture and artist portraiture promoted and developed by ERPAC in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region: at the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste with the photographic exhibition Io, lei, l’altra. Photographic portraits and self-portraits of women artists, at the Luigi Spazzapan Regional Gallery of Contemporary Art in Gradisca d’Isonzo with the exhibition of photography and site-specific works Artist+Artist. Contemporary Visions, and now with the Gorizia exhibition, which will be joined in June at the Revoltella Museum in Trieste by Attraverso il volto, a selection from the museum’s prestigious collection of self-portraits. Altogether, the four exhibitions aim to look at the artist through the eyes of the artists, through his projection in portraits and self-portraits. A multifaceted narrative that is divided into various chapters, focusing on the many possible perspectives that the theme of self-representation eventually intercepts.

Of this project, the Gorizia exhibition represents the necessary introductory premise. The nearly seventy works on display, from prestigious Austrian museums, including the Belvedere in Vienna, outline a path in eight sections from the mid-sixteenth century to the contemporary. This wide-ranging historical perspective makes it possible to highlight the strength of iconographic patterns that are repeated over the centuries, but also the profound transformations behind small variations.

The exhibition itinerary

The exhibition kicks off by framing the theme of the self-portrait in different cultural-historical contexts, emphasizing the link that the artist’s portrait has with the theoretical debate on the arts, historiography, collecting, and the academic institution, in a process that saw the latter progressively emancipate himself from the role of craftsman and establish himself as an intellectual, a man of the court, and a gentleman. Theatelier, the studio, the theme of the third section, is the place where the prestige of art, the relationship with patrons or the new bourgeois public, and the very conception of painting and sculpture come into play. With the section devoted to theviewer, we get to the heart of the play of gazes in the self-portrait: that of the painter looking at himself in the mirror and the portrayed subject looking at the viewer or elsewhere, in a complex and ambiguous mechanism that places the very question of vision at the center. Federico Barocci’sSelf-Portrait, with the face in the foreground and the gaze fixed on the interlocutor, is confirmed as a powerful reference model.

The fulcrum of the exhibition, however, is the section devoted to theself-portrait as self-representation with a series of masterpieces, first and foremost Goya ’sSelf-Portrait from the Belvedere in Vienna, in which the Spanish painter portrays himself with a bourgeois top hat and a strong expressive characterization, avoiding any idealization. Alongside the imposing canvases by Franz Anton Maulbertsch and Carl Peter Goebel the Elder, in which representation is still tied to the model of the courtly gentleman, Ferdinand Georg Waldmüller’sSelf-Portrait (1828), which was chosen as the guiding image of the exhibition, dialogues with Giuseppe Tominz’sSelf-Portrait with Brother Francis, one of the most significant works housed in the Pinacoteca of the Musei Provinciali di Gorizia.

The exhibition is also an opportunity to draw attention to the very close links of the visual culture of the Friuli Venezia Giulia territory with the outcomes of Austrian and Viennese research, with relations and exchanges intensifying in the first decades of the 20th century and going beyond the fall of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A case in point is the Viennese training of Timmel, featured here with a 1910 self-portrait from the Revoltella Museum in Trieste, whose painting finds remarkable connections with that of Richard Gerstl, to which the intense Self-Portrait (1906-7) bears witness.
Manifesting the profound crisis affecting the individual, and at the same time the role of the artist in the twentieth century, are the self-portraits of Kolo Moser and Max Oppenheimer, which show the body, hieratic or suffering, taking as a model Dürer, also the source of Arturo Nathan’s work.

Indeed, the generation of Trieste artists active in the first decades of the century, strongly influenced by interest in psychoanalysis, looks to Viennese culture until the late 1930s. The theme of disguise becomes central: Masks (1930) by Cesare Sofianopulo interprets this kaleidoscopic breakdown of identity almost as a manifesto. The section devoted to this aspect offers an interesting case history of the way artists played different theatrical roles, from the pilgrim to the shoemaker to the clown, playing progressively in the twentieth century on role reversal and ambiguity. A master of this continuous game of disguise, Leonor Fini, as she appears in her 1968 painting, seems to establish a provocative dialogue with Andy Warhol ’s photo taken by Cristopher Makos, in which the theme of sexual identity is explicit.

The artists also often depict themselves in family or group portraits, and these representations speak of a network of artistic and intellectual relationships. The room dedicated to Zoran Mušič, with the artist’s self-portraits alongside those of his father-in-law Guido Cadorin and his wife Ida Barbarigo, is intended to make visitors reflect on the richness of these interchanges, but above all to project them into the future project of Gorizia/Nova Gorica 2025.

The exhibition concludes with the painting Imperial Elke (1999) by Elke Krystufek, in which the Viennese artist portrays herself nude as she observes herself in the mirror taking a photo with her cell phone.

For info: www.musei.regione.fvg.it

Hours: Tuesday through Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Image: Leonor Fini, Self-Portrait (1968; oil on canvas; Trieste, Civico Museo Revoltella - Gallery of Modern Art)

Artists' portraits and self-portraits from the 16th century to the present day on display in Gorica

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