Untitled

Few inventions have impacted more on the way we see ourselves than the mirror and photography. Both are essential when artists make self-portraits. The mirror captures the present, while photos expand time. This painted photorealistic colossal self-portrait was based on a photograph of the artist as a young man. A distance arises between the artist and his image through this time lapse. It widens when his assistants mechanically transfer the photographic image from its original source through a gridwork. When Rudolf Stingel’s career took off in the late 1980s, people were saying that painting was dead. And photography was being questioned as a truth-teller. In Stingel’s series of self-portraits, both media are sharp-loaded.