Leonardo da Vinci presides over the banquet as a Jesus Christ of art. Around him sit Frida Kahlo, Velázquez, Dürer and Andy Warhol, among others. It's a version of The Last Supper in which all the diners are artists, but they're all the same person. A person who turns out to be another Japanese artist.
A Sympósion of self-portrait is the platonic title of the exhibition that the Juana de Aizpuru gallery in Madrid dedicates to the Japanese artist Yasumasa Morimura (Osaka, 1951) until July 29, and which is part of the Off section of the PHotoESPAÑA festival. It is a set of photographs taken over two decades and a video in which the artist uses resources of scenography, makeup, prosthetics, painting and digital editing to get into the skin of several famous authors in the history of art who have stood out for the practice of self-portraiture.
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"They were pioneers of today's selfies," says Morimura. He himself prolongs the tradition of the artist who appears in his own works, but at the same time uses it as a means to reflect on a question as complex and thorny as identity.
The conversation with ICON Design is maintained by video call because, shortly after arriving in Spain from Japan to attend its opening, Morimura tested positive for covid and had to confine himself to his Madrid room. "Take care, it's hard to pass it!" he warns the interviewer. This capacity for empathy has surely been an indispensable factor for an artistic career that, since the mid-eighties, has been based on the mimetic incarnation of other people, not only plastic artists: her series Actresses includes from Brigitte Bardot to Marilyn Monroe, and in her version of Las Meninas she plays all the characters, starting with the Infanta Margaret of Austria.
Morimura appears doubly in some of his works in the exhibition, as in 'Dialogue with Myself'. which shows it duplicated in two Fridas Kahlo.Juana de Aizpuru
When talking about the origins of this practice, he goes back to his lonely boy play: "It's something I enjoy doing since childhood," he says. "Even as a child I played alone and imagined stories. Then I wanted to keep doing it, but for an adult it's harder. In addition, making art also has a public dimension, because your work is seen by people and you must also be connected with society to make it. In spite of everything, being an artist has something to play alone."
It is no coincidence that he cites his childhood to contextualize his work. The postwar Japan in which he grew up was marked by ambivalence towards Western culture, embraced by many as a means of turning the page on war trauma and embracing hopes for a new future. Perhaps this is why most of Morimura's work has focused on artists and celebrities from the West. But it is not lost on him that, as an Eastern artist, there are certain clichés that determine the way in which Westerners approach his work.
"I am aware that there are certain expectations about a Japanese artist," he says. "And at the same time I cannot escape the history of Western art, because I have been educated in it, and it is part of my context." Just as Japanese society had to perform an exercise of emptying its own identity to fill that gap with cultural traits from the West, he performs the same exercise when conceiving and executing his photos: "To become another you have to be neutral, assume a previous non-existence, which is a contradiction. I must renounce myself to assume the identity of Frida Kahlo, and then do it again to be, for example, Van Gogh."
Rembrandt and Dürer, reimagined by Yasumasa Morimura.Juana de Aizpuru
In his images the stage is not hidden, and the makeup and prostheses are visible, reminding us that underneath them there is another identity. And identity is what, beyond masks and tricks, and reflections on the photographic medium itself, Morimura's work is about. The identity of the artists he pays homage to, but also – or above all – his own. "All the works in the exhibition are self-portraits of painters, because through them I speak of their identity by assuming their different points of view. But secondly, through all those identities I question who I am, what my identity is."
Morimura appears doubly in some of his works in the exhibition, such as the one that shows him duplicated in the two Fridas, according to the famous painting by Frida Kahlo of 1939. But also in a Vermeer whose original model does not exist in reality, and where the photographer appears as the woman in blue standing in front of a window, but also in a painting within the frame in the background. He has always been a supporter of splits and mises en abyme (literally, "set into abyss").
For one of his most famous photographs (which he made in two versions 30 years apart) he started from Manet's Olympia, to put himself in the shoes of both the young prostitute and her black maid. Issues of sex, gender and race are invoked when the viewer perceives that both characters have oriental features. In a different way, when Morimura "supplants" Marcel Duchamp who in turn crosses himself as Rrose Sélavy, or when he reproduces a snapshot of Cindy Sherman (another artist known for interpreting different characters in her photographs), the game of mirrors leads to the same questions. The multiplicity of identities is also, in his opinion, a characteristic feature of current times: "Until now, an image represented an identity. But this has changed: your face does not necessarily represent your identity, because you can have several thanks to the avatars and the metaverse. So I don't know what self-portraits will be like in the future."
Panoramic view of some of the works exhibited by Yasumasa Morimura in the Juana de Aizpuru gallery.Juana de Aizpuru.
In the case of his current exhibition in Madrid, perhaps it is in the video Egó Sympósiom (2016) where all these aspects are developed in a more complete way. There, over 75 minutes, Morimura interprets twelve artists who speak in the first person, merging the different spatial and temporal planes. Van Gogh walks through Japanese cities, Velázquez confronts a modern mannequin of King Philip IV and Rembrandt confronts his own paintings in the warehouse of a museum.
This is his sixth exhibition at the Juana de Aizpuru gallery with which he has cemented a relationship of almost twenty years. "For me, Spain is Juana," she says. "I was born in Osaka, where there is a lot of humanity and very intimate personal relationships, as happens in Spain. And Juana is also like that, very passionate. He has always supported me. It's rare for galleries to take care of an artist for so long, and to take care of him as she has done with me."
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