After shows at CaixaForum Seville and the Pera Museum in Istanbul in 2017 and early 2018, the group exhibition Look at Me! Portraits and Other Fictions in the ”la Caixa” Collection of Contemporary Art is now on at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Gas Natural Fenosa (MAC) in A Coruña. This show explores one of the great art genres—portraiture—but takes a somewhat unconventional approach by analysing its relevance and power through the lens of contemporary art, that is, through present-day eyes. It includes work by over forty Spanish and international artists expressed in a wide range of different art forms, including painting, sculpture, photography and video. It offers multiple takes on the notion of identity and the social and cultural conventions that shape our own nature and the way we see others.

The title proclaims two of the show’s core concepts. The imperative Look at Me! immediately conjures up a gaze that speaks to us directly and links us to others. And the artifice of representation contained in the next breath warns of a possible trap: our picture, or the one we use to identify others, depends on an interplay of fictions and intentions which, at the end of the day, blurs concepts such as truth, sincerity and even reality. As exhibition curator Nimfa Bisbe points out, the underlying premise refers to the “interplay that reveals the social mirror in which we ask ourselves such eternally human questions as Who am I?, How do people see me?, Who are they?, How do I see them?”

Look at Me! is divided into four separate, complementary sections that turn the act of looking—and being looked at—into a complex and sophisticated system of reflections and appearances where images are no sooner created than called into question. This brings into play a series of subjective and sensitive aspects such as the emotional power of a portrait, the social conventions governing our gazes, the construction of memory and the possibility of creating masks to protect us or to show us off us not as we are but as how we want to be seen. The space where we create our individual and collective imaginary worlds is where artists continue to play a key role in our culture and our society.

The show features work by the following artists: Ana Laura Aláez, Janine Antoni, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Christian Boltanski, Victoria Civera, Rineke Dijkstra, Marlene Dumas, Esther Ferrer, Günther Förg, Curro González, Stefan Hablützel, Roni Horn, Sharon Lockhart, Pedro Mora, Vik Muniz, Óscar Muñoz, Bruce Nauman, Carlos Pazos, Cindy Sherman, Antoni Tàpies, Gillian Wearing and Sue Williams.

An accompanying catalogue with texts by Nimfa Bisbe, Virginia Torrente and Lorena Amorós has been published to tie in with the exhibition in both A Coruña and Istanbul.