From March 19th to June 26th 2022 Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste presents the exhibition Io, lei, l’altra | Me, her, the other – Portraits and photographic self-portraits of women artists, curated by Guido Comis in collaboration with Simona Cossu and Alessandra Paulitti. Produced and organized by ERPAC – Ente Regionale per il Patrimonio Culturale del Friuli Venezia Giulia (Regional Agency for the Cultural Heritage of Friuli Venezia Giulia) – the exhibition traces, through ninety works, the history of the last one hundred years of photography and allows to evaluate the new conception of women and their role through a succession of extraordinary images by artists such as Wanda Wulz, Cindy Sherman, Florence Henri and Nan Goldin.

The portraits and self-portraits are an extraordinary photographic testimony of the difficult process of self-affirmation and the conquest of a new social identity by women artists in the twentieth century and the first years of the new one. Portraits and self-portraits are places of confrontation, but also of conflict between different expressions of identity. Conventional representation forms contrast with new ways of expressing one’s personality; the established roles of the representation of women, the repetitive poses borrowed from traditional portraits give way to new modes of expression.

If woman were posing as models, later they embraced their creativity actively. Portraits by men – such as Man Ray, Edward Weston, Henry Cartier-Bresson, Robert Mapplethorpe, just to name a few of the photographers presented in the exhibition – are juxtaposed with portraits and self-portraits of women artists and photographers, including Wanda Wulz, Inge Morath, Vivian Maier, Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and Marina Abramović.
The relationship between the subject and the author of the photo contributes to the stratification of meanings and enriches the possibilities of interpretation. If intuition leads us to think that self-representation offers a more authentic image of the author than portraits taken by others, the works often tell a different story in which the women demonstrate that they are able to impose their own personality on the person on the other side of the lens; at the same time, the photographers reveal an extraordinary ability to interpret the character of the person in front of them. Leonor Fini, the Marquise Luisa Casati, Meret Oppenheim use the lens of their male colleagues to express their personality with all their charm and seductive power. Florence Henri, Francesca Woodman and Nan Goldin, on the other hand, focus on themselves the lens of the camera to reveal hidden aspects of their personality and to those who observe them, staging, in some cases, their weaknesses.
The exhibition is divided into sections, each of which accounts for a different form of representation of the roles that women play in photographs. The section entitled “Artists and Models” is dedicated to women who have been creators and at the same time have lent their faces and bodies to the works of others, as is the case with Meret Oppenheim, Tina Modotti and Dora Maar. The section entitled “The Body in Fragments” brings together self-portraits that present images of partial bodies, reflected in fractured mirrors, with the epidermis traversed by lines that interrupt its integrity, as if this reflected the difficulty of representing oneself. The portraits from the 1970s featuring Valie Export, Jo Spence and Renate Bertlmann ironically mimic the traditional image of women as mothers, housewives or sexual objects. “One, None and a Hundred Thousand” collects the self-portraits of artists who, from Claude Cahun to Cindy Sherman, have used their bodies to interpret different identities or stereotypes through masks. Another section deals with the theme of stereotypes in the representation of cultural and sexual identities, another with those in the definition of the canons of beauty, while some photographs are dedicated to artists alongside their own creations, as in the case of the famous portrait of Louise Bourgeois by Robert Mapplethorpe.
Finally, the exhibition Io, lei, l’altra (Me, her, the other) is part of a project launched by the ERPAC cultural institutions dedicated to the theme of artist’s self-portraits and portraits in a historical-artistic perspective that ranges from the seventeenth century to the present day. Starting in May, the exhibition Riflessi (Reflections) will take place at Palazzo Attems Petzenstein in Gorizia, developing the theme of portraits through loans from numerous European institutions, while the exhibition Artista + Artista (Artist + Artist) will be held at the Galleria Regionale d’Arte contemporanea Luigi Spazzapan, bringing together research projects by artists linked to Friuli Venezia Giulia and cross-border territory.