26 july 2022, Flor Linckens
The Ravestijn Gallery presents the versatility of the portrait
Until 27 August, The Ravestijn Gallery in Amsterdam is presenting a group exhibition that centers the photographic portrait.
Portraits have been around as long as humans themselves. Since then, they have evolved from simple registrations to a real analysis of the depicted person that goes much further than the superficial. Symbolic details in old paintings, for example, will tell us much more about the portrayed person than their actual face, sometimes supplemented by some added, borrowed qualities and traits of mythical or biblical characters. The rise of photography would irrevocably change the genre of the portrait. On the one hand, painters became less interested in truthful representations, which resulted in the iconic portraits of artists such as Modigliani and Picasso. On the other hand, developments within the photographic medium ensured that it was no longer necessary to sit still for a full thirty seconds. And just as film initially borrowed from the medium of theatre, photography also outgrew the legacy of painting. To this day, photographers manage to not just register people, but actually capture them. Not just their likeness, but their personality or even their mood.
Inez & Vinoodh, Cindy Sherman - The Gentlewoman, 2019, The Ravestijn Gallery.
In The Ravestijn Gallery, you can see a portrait of the famous photographer Cindy Sherman, who is known for her iconic self-portraits. For this series, made for the magazine The Gentlewoman, she gave photographers Inez & Vinoodh permission to transform her. The duo, consisting of the married couple Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin, are famous in their own right: they made music videos for artists such as Björk, Kanye West, Rihanna and Paul McCartney. They also shot campaigns for Dior, Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton and their work has been included in the collections of museums such as MoMA and Boijmans van Beuningen.
Robin de Puy, Faiza, 2020, The Ravestijn Gallery.
The award-winning photographer Robin de Puy, whose work is also on show, tries to tell her own story through the faces of others. These are often intimate portraits that leave room for vulnerabilities and imperfections. TDe Puy: "In the end it's all about recognition. That I see something of myself in someone.” De Puy's work has been included in the collections of, among others, the Centraal Museum, the Bonnefantenmuseum, Museum Voorlinden, De Nederlandsche Bank and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
American photographer Michael Bailey-Gates plays with the normative and conditioned ways in which we as a society view gender, and offers us an alternative instead; an intimate world in which we can look in a much freer and more limitless way at gender, identity and sexuality, terms that do not have to carry static meanings. Several of their works are on show in this exhibition.
Michael Bailey-Gates, Summer Body 4, 2018, The Ravestijn Gallery.
The Dutch artist duo Blommers & Schumm (which consists of Anuschka Blommers and Niels Schumm) shows a series of unique still life portraits in the exhibition. They made a name for themselves in the fashion world and are known for their playful resistance to the traditional rules of portrait photography. Their work has appeared in publications including Fantastic Man, NY Times Magazine, The Gentlewoman, Self Service, Dazed & Confused, Purple and AnOther Mag.
In the exhibition, you will also see work by Shamus Clisset (FakeShamus), Koos Breukel, Asger Carlsen, Pacifico Silano and Patrick Waterhouse.
Blommers & Schumm, Portrait of David Hockney (Color), 2021, The Ravestijn Gallery.
