Identity Revisited is an examination of personal and cultural notions of identity in contemporary art. International in scope and spanning many generations, this exhibition includes work that addresses history, gender, race, childhood, mortality, and memory.

Each gallery presents a self-contained experience. Some display the work of a single artist; others offer opportunities to look broadly across various themes and concepts. Gallery 1 is occupied by two sculptures. One, by Pierre Huyghe, redeploys the remnants of a colonial-era, neoclassical sculpture as a contemporary living sculptural ecosystem. The other, by Louise Bourgeois, is the artist’s personal construction, with carved and found elements captured in a cell-like cubic cage that reminds one of both schoolrooms and incarceration and functions as a bell jar for memories and psychological trauma. Gallery 2 also has two works in it, each a self-portrait by the photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, both among this great artist’s last works. These portrayals of a man near the end of his life—strong, yet frail, pensive, and resolute—are emboldened and somewhat defiant acts of personal and political affirmation and assertion. The juxtaposition of the works in Gallery 3 examines ideas of scale and its role in representation. At the center is an enigmatic, monumental sculpture, by Thomas Schütte, of a man in a robe. This is surrounded by intimate, life-sized sculptures by artists of various generations and cultural backgrounds. Gallery 6 presents another aspect of portraiture, with portraits and self-portraiture that reflect a wide spectrum of the art of the past six decades. In Gallery 16 the focus narrows again, with works that are personal and cultural ruminations on identity, all made by German born artists working during the postwar period. mehr