Portraits
and Self-Portraits, reflections, repetitions and duplications
Paintings, drawings and photographic etchings
Loréne Bourguignon (1957) lives and works in Rotterdam. She studied
painting in Rotterdam, lived in New York for four years, received several
stipends and organized workshops on philosophy and art in co-operation
with the philospher Antoon van den Braembussche. In 1999 her work was
shown in the Fries Museum, together with, amongst others, Marlene Dumas,
Rosemin Hendriks, Kiki Lamers, Wouter van Riessen and Emo Verkerk. Phoebus
gallery in Rotterdam represents her work, including at art fairs. Her
work is in the collections of Fortis Bank and the Royal Museum of Fine
Arts in Antwerp.
From 1989 until 2000 she made only self-portraits. She then introduced
her father’s portrait into her work. The self-portrait developed
into an androgenous image. This proved to be a great step forward, since
the margin in self-portraits is very small.
She uses randomly shot polaroid pictures of herself and projects the photographs
of her father over them. Based on these projections she makes paintings
and drawings. Using a computer, she creates double-portraits, which are
further developed into heliogravures and photopolymer etchings. In her
most recent installations of paintings, one painting was mirrored and
repeated over and over again, creating an almost cinematic series.
She recently added the portrait of her mother, who died 20 years ago,
to her work. By combining the images of her father and mother in the computer,
new virtual images arose. She compared these last new images with photographs
of herself as a child. By adding these childhood photographs to the new
virtual images in the computer, she is creating, as it were, her virtual
children. She also plans to make paintings on this subject.
In the Retort project space she made a mural on the subject of the duplicates
of her father and mother, titled: 'baby sister (1), 2005', with repetition
as the main theme. In this way the virtual heads become a repeated wallpaper-like
motif.
website gallery: www.phoebus.nl
