Yasumasa Morimura 9 visages

When Yasumasa Morimura saw Rembrandt’s Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp for the first time, he was struck by how similar the nine faces that compose the painting are, so much so he wondered if they were not actually one and the same person. Taking this first impression as a starting point, the artist made his own work entitled 9 visages, in which he replaced the characters’ faces in the painting with his own.
The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain published a catalog for the exhibition that records this experience with texts and images. Yasumasa’s original work invites us to think about identification, disappearance and erasure, while generally raising the question of identity as a whole.