From Fragonard to Dumas: portraits by the Great Masters.

The need for the portrayal of the individual identity is not a modern invention: the idealization of the sitter was already a matter of course in eighteenth and nineteenth century portrait painting. In the exhibition, contemporary portraits are juxtaposed with this convention from an earlier era. What is revealed is a timelessness of the genre, as well as pictoral evidence of social rejection in contemporary portrait painting: loneliness, shattered states, physical and emotional abuse.

The exhibition at the Museum Langmatt compares the different epochs and searches for the conventions of contemporary self-portrayal. Portraits by such artists such as Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Edgar Degas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir enter into dialogue with internationally renowned contemporary artists like Michaël Borremans, Marlene Dumas, and Luc Tuymans.