A touring exhibition developed by the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art.
People’s persistent interest in the self-image is explored in a new exhibition of work from the Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art (QAGOMA) Collection, opening at Cairns Art Gallery on 8 March 2025.
Drawing from QAGOMA’s Australian, Indigenous Australian, Asia Pacific and International collections, Looking Out, Looking In highlights richly diverse approaches to a timeless artistic genre, the complex and fascinating subject of the self-portrait.
Devised against the backdrop of contemporary ‘selfie’ culture with audiences increasingly attuned to the self-image through handheld digital devices, social media and reality TV, the exhibition reveals significant cultural shifts and identifies universal themes that still characterise the genre.
While some artists look inwards to reflect on themselves in self-effacing ways, others project a more flamboyant image. Together, the artworks situate self-portraiture as a dynamic genre responsive to larger societal concerns, and linked to the collective desire to picture and comprehend ourselves.
Works in Looking Out, Looking In are grouped thematically, rather than chronologically, with an emphasis on the contemporary.
The artists included in ‘Altered states’ scrutinise the mutability of the self-image, whether through masking or distortion, while those in ‘In the flesh’ examine their bodies as sites of self-assertion or experimentation. ‘The composite self’ examines the multifaceted nature of identity, and the idea that our sense of self is informed by many influences, including social circles and family ties. ‘Role play’ includes artworks that contest the notion of individuality, and the idea that a self-portrait can reveal a different identity.
These main themes are augmented by works where artists have captured themselves in profile, and photographs that reflect a documentary value and play on the relationship between camera and photographer.
In an age when digital technology has transformed the way we live and interpret our lives, Looking Out, Looking In offers a broad and accessible setting in which to consider our contemporary obsession with self.
Artists featured include Davida Allen, Fiona Foley, Nora Heysen, Kathe Kollwitz, Tracey Moffatt, Vincent Namatjira, Luke Roberts, Cindy Sherman, Madonna Staunton and William Young, among others.
In 1938 when she painted Self Portrait 1938 Nora Heysen won the Archibald Prize with her portrait of Elink Schuurman, wife of the Dutch consul-general to Australia. The first woman ever to win the Archibald Prize, Heysen was treated as a novelty by the press, which stirred intense interest in her life and work through biased coverage of a telling dispute: the artist Max Meldrum had berated Heysen’s success, declaring, ‘If I were a woman, I would certainly prefer raising a healthy family to a career in art’.
Undeterred, Nora Heyson established an independent identity as a painter, and pursued her creative ambition despite the fame of her father, landscape artist Sir Hans Heysen. After studying in Europe, she became an eminent portrait and still-life artist in Australia. Heysen’s strong and direct Self Portrait 1938 recalls the European masters of the early Renaissance she admired.
A generation after Heysen and attracting controversy too before his death – controversy that was sadly stained by racial prejudice – Albert Namatjira (1902–1959) is the stately figure in Albert and Vincent 2014. Painted by his grandson Vincent Namatjira, the celebrated standing of the first Indigenous artist to become known Australia-wide, drew Vincent Namatjira to see his grandfather visualised in Portrait of Albert Namatjira 1956 by Sir William Dargie, a QAGOMA Collection work. Senior curator Bruce Johnson McLean recounted the visit in Artlines 1-2015:
Vincent had seen the work only as a low-colour reproduction, and as a portrait painter whose work is often inspired by the image and cultural impact of his grandfather, he had a strong desire to view the Archibald Prize-winning portrait. Visiting the Gallery earlier in 2014, Namatjira spent many hours with the work, sitting in quiet reverence in the Australian art galleries, leaning a small mirror against a plinth (on which Daphne Mayo’s Olympian c.1946 stood) so that he could view and sketch himself with the portrait of his grandfather.
Through self-portraits created across three centuries, Looking Out, Looking In explores artists as their own subjects from the past to the present, and as we regard the multiple ways in which artists visualise themselves, self-portraits prompt reflection on our own lives.
IMAGE:
Nora HEYSEN
Australia 1911–2003
Self-portrait 1938
oil on canvas laid on board
39.5 x 29.5cm (sight)
Purchased 2011 with funds from Philip Bacon AM through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation Collection: Queensland Art Gallery | Gallery of Modern Art
© Lou Klepac
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