Face and Mask

Role-playing games in portrait art

Should Dieter Roth's Self-Portrait as a Hole be considered a portrait in the same way as Rembrandt's Self-Portrait with a Beret?

Where one describes his face in great detail, the other makes himself disappear in the form of a white "hole". Without the face of the person who wants to give a picture of himself, the identity cannot be determined, let alone discussed about similarity or artistic accuracy. The title of the picture, however, leaves no room for doubt, because with his self-ironic claim to be a "hole", Roth makes it clear that the artist's intention alone determines whether the "hole" is a self-portrait or not.

The exhibition builds a bridge between traditional portraits and abstract portraits. The change in the common concept of similarity is woven like a thread along very different examples of works with which the viewer can explore the tried and tested possibilities of describing identity and sound out the boundaries of the genre: Physiognomic distortions and deconstructions, portraits without faces as well as masks and role plays are facets of modern portrait art in which portrait similarity is only one of many options.

The exhibition on 20th century portrait art, curated by Michael Kuhlemann, begins - as a prologue, so to speak - with a series of self-portraits by Rembrandt, and confronts works of the Western European avant-garde with those from other cultures, especially from China. Works by Max Beckmann, Alexej von Jawlensky, Lovis Corinth, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Horst Janssen, Dieter Roth, Timm Ulrichs, Arnulf Rainer, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Katsura Funakoshi, Yue Minjun, Guo Jin, Qi Zhilong, Xue Song, Qiu Zhijie, Zeng Fanzhi and Zhang Xiaogang are on display, among others.

The intimate exhibition space of a former residential building offers the perfect setting for this genre of fine art and allows you to experience works of museum quality in a private atmosphere. The hanging of the approximately 80 exhibits, all of which come from the ahlers collection, follows the example that is common for private and public collections of artists' portraits: in several rows one above the other, in dense harmony and structured only by the specifications of the spatial architecture.

Zeng Fanzhi

Mask Series 1997 No. 25, 1997
Oil on canvas
ahlers collection
© 2017 Zeng Fanzhi