Yasumasa Morimura

Luhring Augustine, New York
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Yasumasa Morimura’s gaze has found its match in Frida Kahlo. The work that makes up Self-Portraits: An Inner Dialogue with Frida Kahlo, showing concurrently also at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo and Thaddaeus Ropac in Paris, is an intensely pleasurable project in which Morimura poses as Kahlo in thirteen photographic recreations of the Mexican painter’s characteristic self-portraits.

All of the elements that have defined Morimura’s practice are present, but the artist’s new incarnation as Kahlo is the most direct articulation of what he has been working with throughout his career. Kahlo’s art is an uncanny complement to Morimura’s. The artist is once again working with color photographs printed on canvas, some of which are framed in giant, flowered tondoes that feel both sacrificial and celebratory. The images adopt the landscape of Kahlo’s magical realist world, with pearl tears and necklaces of red thorns.

Morimura sets his gaze in direct confrontation with the viewer, as he usually does when he slips into images of others, and as Kahlo always did in her own work. Kahlo’s paintings can be understood as a dialogue with herself, her sexuality, her gender, her dreams, and her desires. Morimura has broken into that dialogue to produce a terribly intimate look into the tools of his project: self-adornment, self-projection, ritual and obsession.

In his 1988 version of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, our own prior knowledge of that painting itself played an important role in our relation to his piece. With the Kahlo self-portraits, the viewer’s relation to the “original” piece is secondary. The transformation becomes the primary focus and, in a sense, the end result of the metamorphosis—Morimura as Kahlo—is a quiet consequence of this greater process.

The portraits in this show, individually and as a whole, possess a certain sadness and sense of reflection, a vulnerability never seen before in Morimura. He has long been engaged in the liberating activity of opening up iconic images as potential reflections of the self, but never has his work appeared as pared down as it does in this dialogue with Kahlo.




Bethany A. Pappalardo