Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney’s Collection

Apr 2, 2016–Apr 2, 2017

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Self-Conscious

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Since the 1970s, artists have increasingly used self-portraiture to explore multiple invented personas as well as darker psychological states. Searching for their own place in a society that prizes youth, fame, and self-exposure, many have adopted strategies from popular culture but often with a twist. Kalup Linzy stars in an imaginary soap opera about the art world, while Jean-Michel Basquiat places himself and his friends along the troubled continuum of African American performers in Hollywood. Other artists confound the air of heroism traditionally associated with the artist’s image, casting themselves as antiheroes shrouded in anxiety and self-doubt. Charles Ray turns himself into the diminutive prisoner of his own art, and Rudolf Stingel depicts himself on a grand scale overcome by melancholy and inertia. In a culture in which the fashion industry, cosmetic surgery, and digital editing have made physical appearance more malleable, the artists whose work is featured in this section testify to a widespread sense of uncertainty in the self and how it might be portrayed.


Below is a selection of works from Self-Conscious.

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UNTITLED (AFTER SAM), 2005

Rudolf Stingel (b. 1956), Untitled (After Sam), 2005–6. Oil on canvas, 139 1/2 × 188 in. (354.3 × 477.5 cm). Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase with funds from the Painting and Sculpture Committee 2006.105 © Rudolf Stingel. Courtesy Paula Cooper Gallery, New York

One of a series of Photorealist self-portraits from the mid-2000s that Rudolf Stingel based on photographs taken by his friend, the artist Sam Samore, Untitled (After Sam) depicts Stingel slumped on a hotel bed, fully dressed. The despondency of his body language and expression suggest a moment of melancholy, self-doubt, or perhaps total exhaustion. And yet, the moment conjured may not be as unpremeditated as it seems—Stingel has stated that the work is not a self-portrait but a depiction of him playing a role. The series is, he said, “paintings of photographs of me posing. Like movie stills.”

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