The Royal West of England Academy in partnership with bo.lee projects presents us with a provocative and challenging exhibition that will awaken the emotions. The exhibition in Bristol is showing until 26th March.
Oneself as Another brings together a select group of painters, sculptors, and photographers from the UK and USA whose work expresses the hidden depths within notions of self by exploring what defines an individual’s being in the world.
Alongside works by Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon whose brutal exposure of the individual psyche are better known; Oneself as Another presents work by artists who offer an alternative contemporary portraiture; one which acknowledges yet refuses the freak show of difference.
Sanctae, a major new work by South West based Ione Rucquoi, supported by Arts Council England, provides the inspiration and centre piece for the exhibition, consisting of an architecturally devised inner space inhabited by larger than life photographic images of haloed, naked female subjects.
Sarah Ball (2012 Welsh Artist of the Year) presents her ‘Damaged Human Series’. Beautifully rendered miniature portraits taken from medical archive photographs explore the narratives that lie beneath the physicality of a face.
Works by London based painter Wanda Bernardino and BP Portrait prize winner Johan Andersson revel similarly in the notion of what is revealed or hidden, while renowned photographer Bob Carlos Clarke toys with the taboo, confronting us on the edges of decency.
By bringing the un-seeable and un-sayable to the fore, this exhibition offers the viewer the chance to reconcile aspects of one’s own, personal narrative – through the brave acknowledgement of Another.
Ione Rucquoi, Sanctae (detail), photographic illustration
Ione Rucquoi, Sanctae (detail), photographic illustration
Emile Alzamoro, Ancestors, ceramic and iron paint, 2013
Cathy Lewis, Paisley Boys, jesmonite
Cathy Lewis, Orlando
Gallagher, 2013
Stuart Wiggins, Malkovich
Francis Bacon, Tripytch (part 3) Inspired by the Oresteia of Aeschylus, 1981
Via: Tail of Wood
