24.01-28.03.2009
The exhibition shows the reconstruction of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s several self-portraits from the early 1970s. It reminds us of his little-known works which has only partially been preserved and functions in the form of documentation which, again, has only partially been published. The axis of the exhibition is the installation featuring a double-sided photo of the artist, leaning over his reflection in a mirror. It is a clear paraphrase of an artist’s narcissistic gaze when looking at himself, while his look cannot reach further than the dilemmas of the creative “ego”. Hence, the artist is not able to see anything but his own reflection. These two other self-portraits of the artist are equally ironical towards artistic “inwardness”. The artist is “excluded” here from what is going around him. The double-sided and double portrait of the artist looking either upwards or downwards is presented next to a corner view where the artist’s gaze does not go beyond the vision of himself. All of Wodiczko’s self-portraits are clearly self-ironical. Wodiczko, using his own image, demonstrates his distance to individualist-like pretence, thus becoming critical towards the modernist celebration of the subject in the Polish art of the 1970s which remained deaf to the gossips on “the unimportance of the author”. The self-portraits in various versions made in 1973 – 1974 found their reference point also in the verified position of the artist’s own artistic practice in the reality of that time. This especially pertains to the subject in the context of the Polish “game of pretending”. The artist, who created many public projections since 1980 in different places of the world, perceives the role of the artist in the categories of social responsibility. In his series of presented (reconstructed) self-portraits, he has abandoned, as Andrzej Turowski wrote, “the egoistic placement of the artistic subject in the centre of creation”.
For the first time Self-portrait with mirror was presented in 1973 in Foksal Gallery (Warsaw), whereas Double self- portrait and Corner self-portrait in Akumulatory 2 Gallery (Poznań) in 1974.
Curator of the exhibition: Bożena Czubak
