Talking Heads Drawing

Which is the most famous painting in the world? Here, most people will respond to this question by saying, Leonardo‘s Mona Lisa. This painting is considered an ingenious and, at the same time, enigmatic and unique representation of a face from the beginning of the more recent European history of the portrait around 1500. What does every individual in the Western world absolutely have to possess? Maybe not everyone will have an answer to that question off the cuff–but it is very easy: Here, everyone must have a portrait from a certain portrait type. It is called a passport photo, and we need it in order to be able to ‚prove‘ our ‚identity‘ in an identity card. Those flying to America nowadays even need a passport with a biometric passport photo that shows everyone in the „always same“– i.e., passport-ready, standardized way of representation. This is the forcibly-standardized, absolute ground zero for representing the human face. Confronted with this, any portrait artist will normally assume the totally opposite position, that of understanding the human face as a very individual esthetic challenge. In his „I“ series, Uwe Bareither shows us how he has faced this challenge as an artist every day. Each day‘s portrait becomes an esthetic individual bearing witness to the artistic struggle with the genre of the portrait. The entire range is plumbed. These paintings are no longer sterile documents, despite the fact that they are part of the self-portrait genre; instead, they are analytical works. Even within their enigmatic reduction of painted suggestions, they still communicate very unique traces of the drama of the facial expressions for which each status of the face can stand. This is why we are willing to include such a portrait in our collection of paintings, while we would not do this, or at least not without hesitation, with a biometric passport photo.

Drawing:Oil on Canvas

Original:One-of-a-kind Artwork

Size:39.3 W x 39.3 H x 1.9 D in

Delivery Time:Typically 5-7 business days for domestic shipments, 10-14 business days for international shipments.