You know a gallery is clutching at straws when they bring Freud into the mix.
‘How are we going to explain why we’ve put all these paintings in a room?’
‘Errr, can we just say it’s because of Freud? No one’s actually read anything by him, they’ll never know we’re just trying to flog a load of self-portraits.’
That’s what’s happened here. Mega-gallery Gagosian has borrowed a gorgeous Rembrandt from Kenwood House and whacked a century’s worth of self-portraits by modern and contemporary artists alongside it, because Freud, apparently. Honestly, it’s a miracle they managed to keep themselves from calling it ‘LOL! Selfies through art history!’
The idea is that it’s meant to be an exploration of how self-portraiture has changed since Rembo. A bit patchy though, isn’t it, jumping from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. To be fair, there are some great works of art here. The Jenny Savile is like a nightmarish vision from a horror film, filled with pain and flayed flesh; the ultra-blurry Gerhard Richter feels like a memory you just can’t recall; the Jean-Michel Basquiat is brutal, rough, slapdash and angry. And then there are the Francis Bacons. Oh man, they are incredible. Twisted, blurred and stretched; stunning angry visions of the self, filled with sweat and self-disgust.
Other works are funny – like Charles Ray’s nude mannequin with a thick bush of pubes – or ridiculous – like Warhol’s horrible giant selfie. Basquiat, Warhol, Bacon, Freud, Picasso: there are some serious names here. But this show has nothing to tell you about self-portraiture and its meaning/evolution. The conceptual gulf between the Richard Prince Instagram work and the Howard Hodgkin abstract is just too vast to cross in a show of this size. It’s too broad, too unconnected, and what in the name of Johan Cruyff is the Rembrandt doing here?!
So many interesting works, so many great artists, so little point.
