Yasumasa Morimura is a weird mixture of curator, artist and simple art lover. Throughout his career he has selected famous portraits and paintings of people and then faithfully recreated them, with the exception of superimposing his own face on the subjects.
This is both an act of sacrilege and adulation that sends out the message that the art world that we carry in our consciousnesses is already so crowded with famous creations that there is little left to do but dwell on our relationship to them.
This is more or less what the "Rembrandt Room Revisited" exhibition at the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art does. The exhibition presents us with a selection of Morimura's narcissistic musings on some of Rembrandt's most famous works, all beautifully lit so that you may at first think you are in the presence of actual Rembrandts. The works themselves are photographs of the artist in costume or make-up merged into the original image and then printed on canvas.
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