Invoking the popular phrase “tête-à-tête”, or head-to-head, this exhibition isolates the head as a formal motif across generations, medium, and artistic approach. A study beyond the storied lineage of portraiture, this selection of works considers the head rather as a recurring iconographic tool.
Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Still #17 serves simultaneously as a self-portrait, a paparazzo photograph of a forgotten starlet, and an everyday woman—glamorous yet anonymous. We are left to consider whether the cinematic composition is in service of the face as subject, or if the head is simply another compositional element of the image. The head finds a more confrontational, layered use in Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Thwart the Law), where a found image reminiscent of a beauty advertisement is superimposed atop a Man Ray photograph of New York's Rockefeller Center. David Hammons’ portrait, from his prominent Body Prints series, uses gestures of trace and imprint to form the outlines of a lips, eyes and beard—imbued with racial and social American discourse.
Jana Euler’s Radieuse pictures a two-headed camel, engaged in their own tête-à-tête. As the artist herself states about the work: “The camel has a second transparent head, painted on top of it, that directly faces the viewer. This way the camel, in a double function as a symbol and a camel, is animated and looks back at the viewer.”
In this literal interpretation of the phrase as conspiracy, meeting, or a private exchange between two persons, we also locate the central framework of this exhibition—the head as a motif, or artistic instrument, that allows for a dialogue between epochs, movements and methods.
