Taking the place of the sitter: self-portraits by six UK-based artists

Allison Katz (b. 1980)

Born in Canada but working in London since 2014, the figurative painter Allison Katz has spent a decade establishing a constellation of recurring motifs in her autobiographical work. They range from cabbages to teeth, but the most frequent — and potent — is the cockerel.

In Cocksure, a monumental self-portrait from 2017, a majestic cockerel — inspired by the 18th-century painting Rooster in the Snow, by the Edo-period painter Ito Jakuchu — struts between her parted thighs.

The symbol clearly has sexual connotations, both through its placement and its historical use as a image of virility. As a triple entendre, perhaps, the artist has also ‘cocked’ her leg. ‘The cock is about power relationships, within and without the world of painting,’ she said in 2021. ‘The cock is repeated (with eye-catching flair) to the point that it is fair game to ask if the cock is me.’

Closer inspection of Cocksure reveals thousands of grains of rice stuck to the surface of the canvas. Now a signature material in Katz’s work, it first began to appear after she found spilt grains on the floor outside her studio, day after day. She first employed it to give her images a tactile dimension in 2011’s The Proposal — a picture of a lone yellow, red and blue cockerel.

Gilbert & George (b. 1943 & b. 1942)

The artistic duo Gilbert & George met in London in 1967, studying sculpture at Saint Martin’s School of Art. Working in tandem, they devised a new form of performance art dubbed ‘living sculpture’, which involved covering their heads and hands in metallic powder and performing British songs from a bygone era.

In 1968, they moved to a house on Fournier Street in London’s East End, where they have lived and worked together ever since, wearing matching suits and following a regimented daily routine — all part of a round-the-clock performance as animate works of art.

The Shape of Drinks to Come, which consists of five panels — known as a pentaptych — is an early example of the pair’s celebrated use of photomontage, a technique they adopted in order to preserve performance beyond a specific moment in time and place. The work is arranged like an altarpiece, with the two solemn artists framed by devotional hands and facing towards a central panel, which depicts an alternative type of spirit.

The work was previously in the collection of Ileana Sonnabend, the influential contemporary art dealer known for her career-making galleries in Paris and New York. In 1971, Gilbert & George performed The Singing Sculpture at the opening of her American outpost, launching their international careers. Two years later, The Shape of Drinks to Come was included in the artists’ show in the space, entitled Modern Rubbish.

Jenny Saville (b. 1970)

The British painter Jenny Saville pushes and pulls oils, charcoals and inks into visceral human forms that blur the boundaries of classical figuration and modern abstraction. Her lifelong interest in the imperfections of flesh was galvanised in the 1990s, after she spent time observing a plastic surgeon at work and studying cadavers in a morgue.

In Self-Portrait, below left, Saville peers down her nose with a cool, confident reserve. Like a cartographer making a map, she uses smudges and scrapes of her charcoal stick to cast a strong shadow across her face, which highlights the planes, bulges and dents in her skin. Her continuous scrutinising and chronicling of her own appearance has drawn comparisons with the work of Rembrandt, who made nearly 100 self-portraits across his career.

Self-Portrait was made in 1992, the same year Saville painted the iconic self-portraits Propped and Branded, which were included in the artist’s degree show at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh. Shortly afterwards, both pictures entered the collection of Charles Saatchi, establishing Saville as one of the pioneering ‘Young British Artists’.

Sonia Boyce (b. 1962)

The British multidisciplinary artist Sonia Boyce — who won the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale in 2022 for the installation Feeling Her Way — has often used herself as the basis for her art, for example in Missionary Position II, which in 1987 became the first painting by a Black British woman to enter the Tate’s collection.

In From Someone Else’s Fear Fantasy (A Case of Mistaken Identity? Well This Is No Bed Of Roses) To Metamorphosis, made in 1987, the artist appears in the form of four black-and-white photographic self-portraits.

Reminiscent of ID photos, the images are surrounded by outdated and offensive representations of Blackness, including King Kong and a ‘Golly’ character. There is also a black rose — a motif the artist adopted as a play on the idea of an ‘English rose’.

This image was a precursor to Boyce’s From Tarzan to Rambo, which includes 12 similar portrait photographs and is now also part of Tate’s permanent collection.

‘What had been the starting point for me, to picture myself in this way, was thinking about films of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly the jungle adventure films or films where Black people seemed to have been most obviously represented,’ she said in an interview with Tate curator Emma Dexter. ‘As a child watching these films, these images became almost like a mirror in which I would see myself mimicking them — as if they were some kind of true representation of what Black people were supposed to be like.’

Antony Gormley (b. 1950)

In 1994, the British sculptor Antony Gormley won the Turner Prize for Testing a World View, five identical iron casts of his own body bent at a right angle. According to the artist, who described the work as ‘Psychological Cubism’, each evoked a different state, from hysteria to catatonia. ‘The piece expresses the polymorphousness of the self; that in different places we become different,’ he said.

Gormley started reproducing versions of his own body in 1981, making plaster casts that would be filled with molten iron or covered in fibreglass and lead. These days, he tends to use digital scans. Some works are exploded into complex wire matrices, while others are reduced to their simplest geometric forms. A number of the most famous have been placed in the Austrian Alps, the Singapore skyline and on the A1, Britain’s longest road.

MEME CX, from 2010, and 1983’s Night represent the artist’s contrasting techniques played out over nearly 30 years. The former is one of 33 sculptures from Gormley’s small-scale ‘Memes’ series of 2009 to 2021, which ‘use the formal language of architecture to replace anatomy and construct volumes to articulate a range of 33 body postures’.

The latter is a full-size sculpture of Gormley’s body, constructed of lead and fibreglass. ‘I am trying to make sculpture from the inside, by using my body as the instrument and the material,’ he has said. This work was included in the major group exhibition The British Show, which toured Australian museums in 1985.

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