National Self-Portrait Prize
"Autobiography is often the emotional starting point for an artwork; through a working through and engagement, it eventually becomes autonomous."
Hilarie Mais, National Self-Portrait Prize
Given the differing interpretations of artists’ self-portraits, it is worth considering the ways in which these self-portraits may lead into artists’ biographies. Parallel to this is the question whether a self portrait is about identity, or is more about art, its processes and the pursuit of these concepts for individual artists. What might a self-portrait reveal of the artist—is it different to other work by the same artist, and how much does the artist’s life influence their work, ideas and conceptual interests? As a sub-genre within portraiture, it might draw the artist, their ideas and approach to art, history and psychology, into the confines of one artwork. But what this genre can disclose about an artist is the subject of academic debate. In an article on the National Museum of Australia’s Encounters exhibition (of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander objects from the British Museum), co-curator Ian Coates is quoted as saying that the exhibition’s power lies in its ability to ‘re-engage contested histories’. While Indigenous cultural artefacts offer other potential and historical readings, his argument may also be applied to contemporary self-portraiture where he said, ‘I think the best objects are those that remain unresolved… They sit outside of historical narratives in a way that there’s a kind of contradiction to them; on the one hand they remain the same, yet on the other the interpretations around them can change over time’. (Sprague 2015)
The power of this dichotomy is at the heart of the University of Queensland’s National Self-Portrait Prize (NSPP), a biennial