Likeness: Portraits Of Artists By Other Artists

CCA Wattis/ICI, NY
Essays by Matthew Higgs, Kevin Killian, and David Robbins. Foreword by Judith Richards and Ralph Rugoff.

Over 40 years ago, Andy Warhol promoted the concept that artists are celebrities, just as worthy of portrayal as other cultural icons. Likeness: Portraits of Artists by Other Artists begins where Warhol left off. Presenting visually striking and conceptually diverse works in a range of mediums, Likeness is the first exhibition and catalogue to propose a recent history of artists' representations of other artists--of friends, peers, and idols. While any portrait is both a document and a personal record of the relationship between the artist and his or her subject, blurring distinctions between public and private, portraits of artists further enrich the situation; they commemorate and concretize the intimate social dramas of the art world and the economies of exchange. Selected here are over 50 paintings, drawings, photographs, and works in other media, created by a loose network of artists primarily active in New York, Los Angeles, London, and Berlin during the past three decades. Included are works by David Armstrong, AA Bronson, Bruce La Bruce, Chuck Close, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Richard Hamilton, Mike Kelley, Sean Landers, Robert Mapplethorpe, Richard Misrach, Dave Muller, Paul Noble, Julian Opie, Elizabeth Peyton, Sigmar Polke, Richard Prince, Wolfgang Tillmans, James Welling, and others.