Last week I shared a work of art titled “Self portrait”, from the Burchfield Penney Gallery.
Here’s a different “Self portrait”, this one by the great Marisol, from the Buffalo AKG:
The information placard for this piece read thusly:
This was the first of many self-portraits by Marisol that are paradoxically both multiplied and fragmentary. Although a “self-portrait”, the sculpture is composed of seven dramatically different heads atop a single wood-block body. They are accompanied by an assortment of other body parts: six carved legs, a single pair of breasts and, at the back, five pairs of variously cast, drawn, or carved buttocks. The multiple heads may allude to the many different sides of every personality and the impossibility of presenting a unified face to the world. Marisol once suggested in an interview that the last head was perhaps like Sunday, yawning with fatigue at week’s end.
I find it interesting to consider new ways of approaching what sounds like an obvious task: creating a self-portrait.
