Portrait Time II | Construction of Exhibitions
The focus of the museum’s current group of exhibitions, like the previous one, is on portraits and their significance. Portraiture, which is one of the classic genres in art, throws into sharp relief questions of identity and modes of representation, as well as the tensions between personal and private expression and social and periodic articulation, and between the desire for material immortalization and the ephemerality of our human nature. In the current exhibitions, the painted portrait, depicting the human face on canvas or wooden panel, is given center stage. A repeating theme in the exhibitions is a repeated return to a single painting subject, or to a collection of subjects with a common denominator – an approach that emphasizes the passage of time and renders present the inherent gap between the real (the living model) and its representation. This repetition is akin to a relentless attempt to capture on canvas the essence of a dialogical relationship between the painter and the subject. The sum of the cumulative moments in these portraits seems to express a yearning to capture a particular inconceivable human state of mind or substance – some elusive essence of the human subject, as well as of the act of painting itself.
