GILLIAN WEARING

Wearing’s paintings clearly evoke many of her familiar themes. Questions of representation, performance, embodiment,mediation, and authenticity are distinctly realized in a suite that abounds with mirrors, doorways, images of the artist herself,and portals of all kinds. Many contribute to what the artist calls the “Historical Family” series, which features “nods to thepast” and to artists “that are more like ancestors.” Wearing’s compositions often draw from the oeuvres of canonical painters,or spirit her into their scenes. “To insert myself into history is to imagine [not only] a different conversation but also [a way to]reframe a work that can mean something to me now,” Wearing wrote upon the appearance of the earliest of these works inGillian Wearing: Wearing Masks, at the Guggenheim in 2021.

The exhibition also features a new photograph in the artist’s “Spiritual Family” series, with Wearing as the Renaissancepainter Artemisia Gentileschi (known for paintings such as Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1620) and the video, Wearing,Gillian, 2018, an AI assisted collage of more than fifteen actors—including Wearing herself—digitally aligned into a deepfakeexploration of the fluidity of identity. Wearing’s photographs emerge not only from a detailed and extensive productionprocess, including costuming, set design, and of course the fabrication of the all-important mask but also research into andcontemplation of how Wearing embodies her subject—just as an actor might.

Wearing’s own eyes usually peer out from behind the masks in her photographs; however, in Rembrandt’s Eyes, 2023 sheappropriates the eyes of the Dutch painter for her own image. Noted for his intense, absorbtive, theatrical self-portraits,the allusion to Rembrandt—or to Gentileschi, Edward Hopper, or Édouard Manet among others across the exhibition—underscores how her multifaceted practice draws from an established archive of images and image-makers embedded inthe history of painting, prints, photography, and performance. A repeated motif of frames and doorways gives architecturalform to a meditation on life’s stages, choices, and forking paths—as well as its echoes and capacity to loop back. Paintingsof mirrors as they reflect a painting, or, another mirror in turn (one struggles to be certain), court their own play of reflectionsand misperceptions, until the observed world is revealed to be as abstract as any purely formal composition.