Lecture, The Academy of Fine Arts
Art and Cultural Science
The early female self-portraits are portraits of the self – painted from the mirror. Yet their purpose is not as self-sufficient reflection as told in the myth of Narcissus. Rather, they demand for the recognition of women as professional painters and serve the artists’ search for self. Recognition in the mirror image is of decisive importance for the formation of the subject. With the emergence of abstraction, the subject of the unconscious increasingly appears in painting, indicative of our desire. A representational system moves to the foreground—one that explores emotional states and, going beyond familiar modes of symbolization, reveals self-conceptions and processes of creation. It circumvents the function of depiction and leads to a new image. The gaze turns inward, in order to translate it into the universal.