Gillian Wearing & Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask

Strange but compelling exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of curated by contemporary artist, Gillian Wearing, to showcase the work of early 20th century artist Claude Cahun and her own response to it.

The wonderful discovery for me was the work of Cahun who was born Lucy Schwab and fell in love at school in England with Suzanne Malherbe, later called Marcel Moore when they both took gender neutral names. Cahun specialised in staging photographs of herself which not taken for display but as an ongoing dialogue with herself. I was fascinated by their years in occupied Jersey during the war where they wrote propaganda leaflets until they were arrested and sentence to death. I loved the photos of Cahun dancing on a wall on the Liberation of Jersey.

Cahun used masks in a number of her photographs as well as staging scenarios to take pictures of. Wearing highlighted her own work which does this. It was interesting to see a series of the masks she had used and see how they had technically developed over time. I loved her series of large scale portraits in which she uses masks to become members of her own family past and present. They were quite haunting.

The show was an interesting comparison of contemporary and older work and a good study of a contemporary artists influence however I came out of the show wanting to know more about Cahun’s life and art not Wearing's.

Closes on 29 May 2017

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