Exhibitions2022Me, Myself, I: Artists’ Self-Portraits 

Me, Myself, I: Artists’ Self-Portraits at the RWA, Bristol provided historical context to contemporary selfie culture through an exploration of self-portraiture over the last three hundred years. The exhibition, curated by Tessa Jackson OBE, explored the ways artists have imagined and presented themselves: from the highly personal and psychological to the controversial and political.

Turk’s Identity Crisis (1994) was on display as part of the exhibition. The piece is a photographic mock-up of a cover of Hello! magazine featuring the artist and his family presented on a light box in the style of an advertisement. The amusingly prescient work higbhlights how the complexities of an artist’s practice can be lost when they are used to feed a mainstream appetite for gossip, lifestyle and celebrity.

Me, Myself, I: Artists’ Self-Portraits included over 80 artworks by major artists who challenged social norms and defied conventions, who questioned identity, gender and representation ahead of their time, and who have been able to think afresh in an ever-changing world. The exhibition was a timely re-examination of a fundamental area of art history that brought together work from the 1720s to the 2020s.

Featured artists included Grayson Perry, Tracey Emin, Sonia Boyce, Antony Gormley, Gillian Wearing, Harold Offeh, Shani Rhys James, Shanti Panchal, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffman, Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Lucian Freud, Patrick Heron, Tony Bevan, Madame Yevonde and many more.