Group exhibition, Dialogue with the Self-Portrait: Ida Barbarigo presents Zoran Music

Axel Vervoordt Gallery is pleased to present an inaugural exhibition featuring the work of the late Slovenian artist Zoran Music (1909-2005). Following the gallery’s collaboration with Ida Barbarigo (1925-2018) during her lifetime, Barbarigo selected the gallery to represent her estate including her husband Zoran Music’s work.

Dialogue with the Self-Portrait is a double exhibition by Music and Barbarigo. Both were tenaciously dedicated to painting and obsessed with specific themes, which they explored through countless variations. Both artists made many self-portraits with a singular style and approach.

A survivor of the Dachau Concentration Camp, Music turned to silence and contemplation through painting. The colours of Music’s self-portraits are those of the desert — harsh and sober — eliminating the superfluous and reduced to a minimum. Music said: “What interests me is bringing out the interior aspect. I see my portrait like any other landscape, a landscape that reflects what is inside me.”

Barbarigo’s attitude towards self-portraits springs from a universal consideration of the nature of the painting: “A painter’s real self-portrait represents his or her entire oeuvre.” Her body emerges and transforms into leaves, pieces of fruit. Ida saw herself like the Herms in mythical times, as immobile images fixed on a vision of the future.

Music not only looked at himself, but he also painted Ida numerous times. She was a necessity to him, she appeared in his paintings like an automatic apparition. “I do not paint others, because I don’t know them”, he once said. Zoran also depicts the two of them together to get closer, almost fearing their encounter. The figure of Ida gradually gets closer, penetrating the private space of Music’s self-portrait.

Dialogue with the Self-Portrait is an intimate exhibition about looking at oneself and examining the other. Barbarigo and Music placed themselves in the same silent setting. As stated in the catalogue Double Portrait: “Painting brings them virtually close and separates them in their shared intent. Their most loyal ally and the only opportunity for them to truly come together.”