Perpetual Portrait Perpetual Portrait

Vielmetter Los Angeles is excited to present Perpetual Portrait, a group exhibition featuring the work of thirty artists drawn both from and outside of the gallery’s program who have made the portrait a central part of their practice. The exhibition spans all three galleries and will be on view from July 8 to August 18, 2023. It brings together a multitude of approaches and perspectives by artists from different generations and cultural backgrounds to situate our understanding of the genre into a new and complex framework. While cross references abound, several themes resonate throughout the exhibition, including self-portraiture, the portrait as a symbol, and portraiture as a tool to convey larger societal issues.
 
Nicole Eisenman’s monumental sculpture entitled Perpetual Motion Machine inspired the exhibition’s focus. First featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial, the bronze depicts the artist as a larger-than-life figure perpetually moving a paint stick from which tuna fish cans jangle, a gesture that both expresses the perpetual labor of an artist or, on a more fundamental level, the ever repetitive struggle of every-day life. Situating themselves into a European male dominated history, Eisenman condenses notions of labor and futility, struggle and pleasure, tediousness and hope into a powerful figure that is both rooted in the past and leads to the future. These complex themes reverberate throughout the exhibition as the artists explore what it means to create a portrait in our times. Deploying a wide range of techniques and mediums, they engage with conceptual and formal strategies to explore perpetual currents of the portrait.