Votre Portrait（Your Portrait）
あなたの肖像
- Birth Year
- 1935
- Death Year
- 1990
- Date
- 1974
- Technique, Material, Format
- birdcage, gypsum, synthetic resin
- Dimension
- 30.2 x 34.3 x 22.7 cm
- Category
- Sculpture or Three-dimensional Work by Japanese Artist
- Inventory Number
- 86-SJ-001
This is one of Kudo Tetsumi’s well-known Votre portrait (Your Portrait) works. The “you” in the title has several meanings. For example, it refers to the viewer who might look at the work with preconceived values, or it could mean the artist himself, who is naturally its very first viewer. It also refers to the human race, who cannot escape the environmental pollution caused by radiation. The birdcage contains a slightly decayed picture of a face with a vacant gaze. The face belongs to 20th century playwright Eugène Ionesco, who went from being an active member of the avant-garde to becoming a deeply conservative figure. Kudo believed that this kind of ideological transformation was common among postwar European intellectuals, and he uses images of Ionesco to question its meaning.
(YATSUYANAGI Sae)