Gallery opening times:
Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th September 11am – 4pm
Saturday 3rd & Sunday 4th October 11am – 4pm
Preview: Friday September 25th 6pm – 8pm
Matt Antoniak presents new work from a series started in 2013. Face Value is an exhibition of paintings and drawings that evaluate and consider the role of the self-portrait within contemporary society.
In making these works, a photographic self-portrait of the artist is uploaded to an Internet search engine, which then returns “visually similar” images. The resulting images are then painted.
This process, that at first glance may seem arbitrary, tackles a multitude of different notions indirectly. Not least the idea of a hyper-connected and informed world, principally due to the Internet. The unprecedented rise of social media, the selfie and other sharing technology has only served to heighten this inter-connectivity, and the face as an image has become ubiquitous. Hence, rather than being an insight into a character, as has been the case within art history, the self-portrait can often be something that conceals more than it actually reveals. These paintings manipulate this sentiment, and identity, communication and the art historical self-portrait are explored and re-evaluated.
