Our persistent interest in the self-image is explored in the Queensland touring exhibition ‘Looking Out, Looking In: Exploring the Self-Portrait’ from March 2025. Devised against the backdrop of contemporary ‘selfie’ culture through historical examples and artworks that reflect contemporary trends, the exhibition highlights a diverse approach to the timeless artistic genre. We have become increasingly attuned to the self-image through the ubiquity of handheld digital devices, social media and reality TV, all of which create a new context for self-portraiture. Through historical examples and artworks that reflect contemporary trends, the exhibition reveals significant cultural shifts and identify the universal themes that still characterise the genre. While some artists look inwards to reflect on themselves in self-effacing ways, others project a more flamboyant image. Together, the artworks situate self-portraiture as a dynamic genre responsive to larger societal concerns, and linked to the collective desire to picture and comprehend ourselves.’ We see artists scrutinise the mutability of the self-image, whether through masking or distortion, while others examine their bodies as sites of self-assertion or experimentation. We look at the multifaceted nature of identity, and the idea that our sense of self is informed by many influences, including social circles and family ties, alternatively there are those that contest the notion of individuality, and the idea that a self-portrait can reveal a different identity. Then there are artists that have just captured themselves in profile, or photographs reflecting a documentary value and play on the relationship between camera and photographer. In an age when digital technology has transformed the way we live and interpret our lives, ‘Looking Out, Looking In’ considers our contemporary obsession with self. George W Lambert Self portrait (unfinished) c.1907 Marjorie Fletcher Self-torso 1934 Nora Heysen Self portrait 1938 James Gleeson Structural emblems of a friend (self portrait) 1941 Laith McGregor Maturing (still) 2008 Vincent Namatjira Albert and Vincent 2014 Participating Venues: 8 March 2025 – 15 August 2027 Cairns Art Gallery 8 March – 1 June 2025 Caboolture Regional Art Gallery 21 June – 6 September 2025 Stanthorpe Regional Art Gallery 29 November 2025 – 18th January 2026 Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery 30 January – 19 April 2026 Gladstone Regional Art Gallery & Museum 1 May – 20 June 2026 Artspace Mackay 3 July – 20 September 2026 Toowoomba Regional Art Gallery 13 February – 9 May 2027 Qantas Founders Museum 22 May – 15 August 2027

Though not a painting of a named sitter, Portrait group (The mother) 1907 (illustrated) by Australian artist George W (Washington) Lambert (13 September 1873-1930) nevertheless belongs to that category of art — Edwardian salon portraiture — which flourished in England in the first decade of the twentieth century. These were works especially characterised by flamboyance and bravura, where old master techniques were combined with a freshness that was distinctly modern, and they disappeared,along with the elegant and unhurried lifestyle they depicted, with the arrival of the First World War. Portrait group (The mother) is one of a series of works that feature the artist’s wife, Amy, and their children, Maurice and Constant. It is also one of several works, which include Lambert’s friend and colleague, the artist Thea Proctor. George W Lambert The artist and his wife 1904 George Lambert met his future wife Amy Abseil in 1898 while he was studying at Julian Ashton’s Sydney Art School with her sister Marian. Amy worked as a retoucher at Falks, the photographers, and had aspirations to write. In May 1899 Amy published two short stories in the Australian Magazine, the short-lived journal started by several Sydney artists including Lambert, Thea Proctor and Sydney Long as a rival to the Bulletin.While not quite a suffragette, Amy was nevertheless rather anti-establishment, particularly so for the times. Tall, thin and elegant, she was given to wearing large, flamboyant hats; her dark eyes and hair and high cheek-bones giving her beauty an exotic, almost mysterious quality. George W Lambert Self portrait (unfinished) c.1907 George, in contrast, was blond and blue-eyed — a ‘job-lot Apollo’ according to his friend WB Beattie. His energy was like that of a comet, Amy wrote, but with a touch of remoteness, as if he were above other people, a quality she found particularly attractive. He had a ‘fine, baritone voice’ and a flamboyant personality; something of a dandy, even in the midst of the most dire poverty he would maintain a sartorial presence. He had little desire for an ordinary life and neither did Amy. She idolised him from the beginning and remained absolutely devoted, despite years of neglect and then widowhood, until her death at the age of ninety-two. Two days after they married in 1900, the Lamberts set off on board the SS Persic for England. They went immediately to Paris where Lambert and his friend Hugh Ramsay studied at Colarossi’s studio. Their life was spartan as they tried to eke out a living from the proceeds of Lambert’s Bulletin money and the last of his NSW Society of Artists’ Travelling Scholarship. After the birth of Maurice in June 1901, the circumstances of their lifestyle became intolerable and they returned to London so that George could seek portrait commissions to improve their income. Amy coped well with their continual need for money, perhaps as a result of her working-class upbringing, often doing the hard domestic work that a servant would normally have carried out. George W Lambert On the Strand 1909 Though continually struggling to make ends meet, the Lamberts moved in a large circle of artists, musicians and writers and led an active social life that revolved around activities such as the annual Chelsea Arts Club Ball. George organised tableaux vivants, pageants and costume balls during this period and revelled in the theatricality of it all. As his biographer Anne Gray has stated, his paintings are frequently the pictorial equivalent of these performances in which artifice played a necessary role. George also supplemented their income by giving horse-riding lessons in Hyde Park and doing book and magazine illustrations. Always a good draughtsman, he now honed his drawing skills to a point few artists reached and is deservedly known now as much for his drawings as his paintings. Two such works are On the Strand 1909 (illustrated) and The simpler life 1905 (illustrated) — the latter a portrait study of Thea Proctor — and would seem to confirm the generally held view that it is in these simpler sketches that Lambert best caught the expression of the sitter. George W Lambert The simpler life (portrait study of Thea Proctor) 1905 George W Lambert The three sisters 1906 In the summer of 1903 Thea Proctor re-entered the Lamberts’ lives. She had come to London to study and both George and Amy greeted her warmly and compassionately, understanding at once her homesickness and loneliness. She became a daily visitor to the Lambert household, taking tea with them and sharing visits to concerts and the theatre. At first she visited both husband and wife, until Amy began asking if they had to see ‘quite so much of Thea’. Soon she began to sit for Lambert in his studio. At 24, Thea was six years younger than Lambert (Amy was one year older). An elegant young woman from a solid country background, she was child-free and freespirited — a younger version of his wife — and was, in addition, as obsessed with art and art-talk as Lambert himself. She soon developed a habit of coming and going from both studio and house as she liked. In August 1905 a second son, Constant, was born and Amy became totally taken up with the childrens welfare. As their small flat was now very crowded, Lambert took a studio in Chelsea where he spent most of his time. George W Lambert Kitty Powell 1909 As Lambert’s career as a society portraitist grew, he was busier and busier, and Amy threw herself completely into motherhood, a role she truly relished. A distance developed between husband and wife, reinforced by the nature of Lambert’s social and professional life which, as often as not, excluded women. In 1906, for example, he had joined the all-male Modern Society of Portrait Painters and many evenings were spent socialising with expatriate artists Tom Roberts, Arthur Streeton and George Coates, as well as the British painters. By 1907 Lambert was earning a sizeable income from his...

‘In the Flesh’ examines the body as a site of self-assertion and empowerment, with works ranging from performance, painting, photography, sculpture and video. These artists reveal cultural shifts and universal themes. Julie Rrap In this large-scale photograph Julie Rrap recasts renowned Norwegian artist Edvard Munch’s painting Puberty 1894–95 — made a century earlier — to contest the trope of the male artist and his female muse, and the primacy of painting over photography. The artwork is one of nine that Rrap began in the 1980s after she travelled to Europe, where Munch’s work was attracting renewed interest. Disquieted by Munch’s depictions of women and confounded by the dearth of women artists included in European exhibitions of contemporary art, she restaged his paintings using herself as subject, photographing, collaging and hand-colouring the images before rephotographing them. While assuming the same pose as the vulnerable young woman in Munch’s painting, Rrap regards the viewer with a direct gaze in an overt challenge to age-old stereotypes. Stelarc Performance artist Stelarc has been engaged in various investigations of the body, the most well-known and dramatic of which are his body suspensions. Performed in various sites and situations around the world – including Japan, USA, Germany and Australia – Stelarc pierces his skin with hooks attached to load-bearing strings to suspend his body in different positions. Not all the performances have been static; his body has swung, spun, swayed and propelled itself. In some instances, Stelarc incorporated the amplified sounds of his heart beating and muscles stretching. In these documented performances, Stelarc explored what it means to be human, examining how the body is the site of human experience in a changing world affected by new technologies. Tyza Hart Tyza Hart works in a range of mediums, manipulating depictions of themself as a means of self-exploration, and to challenge common perceptions of gender and sex. Hart explains that their self-portraits are: . . . driven by a childhood desire to be perceived as male. Resulting self-portraits – typically comprised of a characteristically male body and my face – depict ambiguously gendered selves. I explore transgender identity through this continual self-portraiture, which is politicised by my public failure to conform to gender norms when the works are exhibited. By resisting and engaging with popular understandings of transsexual narratives, I aim to highlight some alternatives to the strict binary understandings of gender.

The artists included in the theme ‘Altered states’ scrutinise the variability of the self-image, whether through masking or distortion. James Gleeson Among Australia’s most prominent surrealists, James Gleeson (1915-2008) himself wrote about this self-portrait: Above the head a hand holds a ‘blood line’ which links all the elements in the painting. Someone has suggested it represents the hand of God. My own feeling is that it is a symbol of my father who died in the Spanish Flu pandemic early in 1919, when I was barely three years old. I have no recollection of him at all, though from a surviving drawing he did in his teens (dated 1897) without art training of any kind, I seem to detect a talent that was never allowed to develop. The figure in the bridal gown was adapted from a photograph of my mother, and at the end of the ‘blood line’ the little boy looking at the sky and holding a balloon / moon / sun / world is of course an early me, wondering what lies ahead. Brett Whiteley From the mid-1960s, many of Brett Whiteley’s (1939-92) portraits can be seen not so much as optical studies as explorations of the psyche — whether his own or that of others with whom he identified. His self-portraits often include fractured, distorted heads implying the creation of another self or multiple identities, as in Self portrait – showing seven incarnations. This interest was fuelled by Whiteley’s reading of the esteemed British psychiatrist RD Laing’s book The divided self (1960), in which Laing proposed that insecurity about self-existence elicited a defensive reaction in which the ego might split into separate parts, generating classic psychotic symptoms.The painting may also reference Whiteley’s fascination with eastern philosophies and ‘reincarnation’, which was of particular interest to the generation who lived through countercultural movements of the 1960s. In 1966, Brett and Wendy Whiteley travelled by ship from Australia to the United Kingdom, with a stopover in Calcutta. The staggering social and cultural contrasts between Australia and India had a profound effect on the artist. Dale Frank Imposing in scale, Dale Frank’s self-portrait is an exploration of the interior self and the relationship between the unconscious and conscious mind. Exemplifying the immediacy of large gestural mark-making, the obsessively rich maze of lines can be seen as a metaphor for the artist’s complex and multi-layered personality. Expanding and contracting like magnetic fields, the contours bear evidence of a struggle to give shape to the search for self-knowledge. Like James Gleeson’s Structural emblems of a friend (self portrait) from 1941 (illustrated) Frank employs common elements of the Surrealist’s vocabulary: the repeated eye motif, biomorphic shapes and an almost automatic dream-like rendering of the image.