What is the self?
A strange, peculiar, oddly grotesque yet comically gleaming being? A thing displaced and beautiful, with an ever newly interleaved and impenetrable identity? Or is it a void? A silhouette with which what we call ‘self’ is revealed to others, leading thus a multitude of lives, leaving to us its traces only in images?

This something that we look at in the mirror almost every day – and that, miraculous and surreal, shifts constantly between empty space and container, substance and changing form – is nonetheless unsteady. It slips by us and squirms with its capricious changeability at precisely those moments when our attention shifts and we briefly turn away our gaze. In these moments it can happen that something long forgotten, something illogical and comical, pushes itself in front of reality and brings us along into another world, one in which the self as expression manifests itself iridescently, at once quietly and unsettlingly, in our countenances and bodies.

With these observations on the self as something confounding, caricatured, and, at the same time, fantastic as backdrop, LINN LÜHN is especially pleased to present Something Like a Self, an exhibition with works by Brian Calvin, William N. Copley, and Karl Wirsum.

Building upon the achievements of European Surrealism and its oft overlooked regional developments between the East and West Coasts of North America, the works of these artists exhibited here move as though in front of a transparent backdrop, one revealing the oneiric, the unconscious as well as the uncanny as aspects of a self whose facets are thus all the more grounded in the medium of drawing.

Influenced in his early years of study by a portrait drawing by H. C. Westermann, American toy designs of the 1950s, Japanese woodcuts, as well as the humor of newspaper comics and the jokes in Marx Brothers films, Karl Wirsum’s works on paper since the 1960s show the self as the shimmering image of another side of our identity. This is an image that makes gleeful use of the aesthetics of early cartoons and of perversion avant la lettre, deriving the components of a fictional self from the sexual and the grotesque, as well as from a fascination with the mechanics of robots and insects. Wirsum’s powerful lines, which populate in rich detail the bodies of his figures, become echoes that annex these contours into the work’s visual construction. Such lines can also be found in the works of William N. Copley as well as in the drawings of Brian Calvin. If in Copley – the American Surrealist painter, onetime gallery owner, and novelist of work titles – they become part of the story of his life, then in Calvin the lines act as constitutive means to an analysis of the human person.

Here the hatched lines course across the Cubist set pieces of combined portraits, allowing the constitutive parts of the self to emerge from within the ego as the literal ‘other.’ Calvin’s 2022 pencil drawings – gently, subtly – abstract the layers of the self and, no less so, our ways of looking, displacing them once more into another world, where the self confronts us sublimely and sensitively anew.

So what is the self? Its verity lies before us.

Philipp Fernandes do Brito

An exhibition by Linn Lühn & Philipp Fernandes do Brito