Under This Mask: Claude Cahun and Gillian Wearing

GILLIAN WEARING AND CLAUDE CAHUN

The National Portrait Gallery

6th May 2017

“Under this mask, another mask. I will never finish removing all these faces.” Claude Cahun. 

There’s a lot of like right now in London, and there’s more than one thing I could write about from my recent trips to the city centre. I could write about how surprised I was by the Hockney exhibition at the Tate Britain. I was in the gallery to see Cerith Wyn Evans's Forms in Space… by Light (in Time), and I popped in just because I was there. I wouldn’t have made the trip for it alone. There were a few pieces that completely blew me away, though, and I’ve found myself reconsidering Hockey’s practice. 

There’s also the Wolfgang Tillmans exhibition at the Tate Modern. It’s certainly an exhibition that has stuck with me and one that speaks strongly towards our current climate. I need a few more days to mull it all over, though. I need a second look, maybe, to bring it all together in my head. I make no promises, but I expect it’ll be the feature of a future post. Especially as I'm keen to head back to the Modern for Giacometti... 

Today, though, I’m going to write about a quieter exhibition, one that doesn’t seek to encompass the whole state of the world but instead focuses on the state of the individual— “Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahan: Behind the Mask, Another Mask” at the National Portrait Gallery, on until 29th May. 

I’ve never been much of a fan of the Portrait Gallery’s exhibition space, and these days, it takes something special for me to put up with it. I think it was the Giacometti exhibition that first put me off— the flow felt confused and ill thought out to me, and it was all down to the arrangement of the rooms. They had clearly been cobbled together from the main gallery space, and nothing about it felt unified. The whole space feels like one long corridor.

Claude Cahun was more than enough to reel me in, however, and as soon as I stepped into the exhibition, I was glad that I had put my reservations to the side. You’re greeted with two works: four small Cahun self-portraits on the right wall, Don’t Kiss Me I’m in Training, 1927, and on the left, Gillian Wearing’s Me as Cahun Holding a Mask of My Face, 2012. It isn’t subtle introduction, but it is a powerful one— there can be no doubt as to why the curators have placed these two artists together and no doubt as to what we can expect in the rest of the show. Indeed, as the exhibition goes on to cover their formative years, that introduction remains at the fore, presenting questions and creating links. 

There are the visual links— the interest in self-expression and self-reflection. There are masks and explorations of gender expression. There’s a questioning of what it means to be an artist. There’s an interest in the surreal. 

More than that, though, the works seem to link their whole artistic spirit. There’s such a sense of play and exploration in this exhibition, such love and life. For Wearing and Cahun, the limits are there to be tested, and roles are there to be tried on— with warmth, with curiosity, with adventure. Within that, there’s also this awareness, a celebration of all the facets of life, all the district elements that create a person. There’s a sense of struggle with that, but there’s also joy. It’s about how we can know and understand ourselves. How we can reflect. 

There’s a strong interest in the nature of photography as well, of course. There is an exploration of what we do when we capture a likeness. What that means for the future generations, what it means about the self and about memory. But it isn’t nearly so bland, so impersonal. This is personal. This is vital. This is joyful and expressive.  

This kind of exhibition is exactly what I love to see from the Portrait Gallery. It takes their mandate of portraiture but still manages to engage deeply with artistic practice, manages to stay fresh and vital.