John Keane Twelve Selves (Selve Twenty Two), 2017

This arresting self-portrait by British political artist John Keane is from his Twelve Selves series (2018), an exhibition of single self-portrait images obscured to question the nature of self-reflection and how experience informs our understanding of self. The series started with an image taken in 2013, in which Keane placed himself in the role of a victim of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police, alongside a series of sourced imageryshe surrounding the Moscow show trials that took place during the 1930s. In the following years, this self portrait became a recurring motif, forming the material for both a existential meditation and a period of painterly exploration spanning close to fifity works. Altering the painted or printed portrait using chemical processes, Keane engages with the tension between image and its material substance, allowing materials to play an active role in determing the image while retaining the vestiges of its original meaning. Despite the incursions on the surface of each painting, the original image, imagined as a response to fear and uncertainty, appears resistant to destruction or attempts to render it silent. 

John Keane has established a reputation as a political artist through a sustained artistic inquiry into the horrors of military and social conflicts around the world and the effects of media distortion. His subjects have included Northern Ireland, Central America and the Middle East; and has involved working with organisations such as Greenpeace and Christian Aid. Keane first came to prominence when he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum in 1990 to be the Official British War Artist of the Gulf War. He is also known for commissioned portraits of notable individuals such as Mo Mowlam, Jon Snow and Kofi Annan.  He has exhibited nternationally and his work is in public collections including Chase Manhattan Bank, New York; Christie’s Corporate Collection, London; Detroit Institute of Fine Art, Michigan; Glasgow Museums: Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow; and the Imperial War Museum, London. He was invited to be the inaugural Artist in Residence at the School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, Scotland in 2014, and was the winner of the Main Prize for the Aesthetica Art Prize in 2015. He was the subject of a book by Mark Lawson, The Art of John Keane, published by Flowers Gallery in 2015. He lives and works in London.