What I am is what I am, online exclusive show

While we grapple with the consequences of the global COVID-19 emergency, we ask our friends to stay safe and spend as much time as possible in social distancing. We hope that art can reach you even in difficult times through virtual tools.

We are proud to present an exhibition devoted to the portrait and auto-portrait issue. This key topic of art throughout history is going to been interpreted by several modern and contemporary artists such as Silvia Gaffurini, Alberto Giacometti, Silvia Idili, Urs Lüthi, Renato Mambor, Ryan Mendoza, Helmut Newton, Pablo Picasso, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mel Ramos, Andres Serrano, Andy Warhol. 

In Renato Mambor‘s work, auto-portraiture becomes a kind of a pop element of the figurative painting, to whom the involvement of the human figure makes more convincing. In photographic work by Ryan Mendoza, the presence of the human figure gives birth to an uncanny and disturbing atmosphere which is in this case put at the service of history. Urs Lüthi complete portfolio Don’t Ask me if you know that I am too weak to say no, dating back to 1976-77, is a full inquiry on how to apply autoportrait at the depiction of the daily life of human identity.

Visionaries by Silvia Idili included in the show have the same disturbing effect within a painting figuration that is collecting its own linguistic elements for Metefisica and modernism.
In parallel to Urs Lüthi’s work, Silvia Gaffurini‘s Plastic Bag inquiry develops an original use of the photographed body: the plastic in which she’s enveloped, hanging up from a real hanger, is a reference to the condition of being prisoners of consumerism and beauty stereotypes related to feminity.