125 Newbury presents Face Values, a group exhibition that brings together artists who deal with the problem of the human face.

Public Reception Friday, June 9, 2023, from 6 - 8 PM. 

Encompassing painting, drawing, and photography, the exhibition includes the work of more than twenty artists who employ a diverse range of practices to explore a shared set of questions: How do we recognize a person in a face? When is a portrait a likeness and when is it an icon? When is a face a mask, and when is it a stranger, a lover, a friend? Addressing these and other questions, the works in this exhibition confront the human face in all its complexity, intimacy, and strangeness.

In photographic self-portraits by Ana Mendieta, Nina Katchadourian, and Lucas Samaras, the face becomes an engine of performativity and a constructor of self. Photographs by Warhol and Irving Penn meanwhile look outward, using the camera’s gaze to render the faces of others as icons. For Avedon, the face is a politics; while for Peter Hujar and Kiki Smith, it becomes a screen for pathos, a cipher for the martyr and the saint. In his self-portraits, Samaras reveals the face as a mirror, a totem for otherworldly selfhood—a condition literalized in Sydney Vernon’s depiction of a face refracted in a hall of mirrors. Gordon Parks uses photography to unveil the everyday sublime in the faces of others, while the paintings of Amoako Boafo and Henry Taylor orchestrate the materiality of painting to hold likeness and identity in suspension. Eric Fischl, Elizabeth Peyton, and Andy Robert reveal the face as a site of closeness, care, and affinity.