Weird exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery
When you go to an art gallery you expect to see different pictures. Maybe by the same artist. Maybe on a common theme.
But you don’t expect to see one picture hundreds of times over.
Except that if you go to the National Portrait Gallery at the moment, that is exactly what you will see.
Artist Francis Alys has collected hundreds of images of Saint Fabiola. All of them are versions of the same original painting – a painting that itself has been lost, so that it survives only in these copies. They are all the same – and they are all, of course, also slightly different.
In every painting, Fabiola – a little known saint – looks left, her head covered in a red veil. But the colours vary slightly from one image to the next, and so does the style, from sophisticated professional copies to amateur daubs.
It’s an impressive collection – Alys has put it together over many years, haunting junk shops, antique centres and flea markets. But the most impressive thing is the faithfulness of all these copies to their model. Many of them may have been copied from prayer cards – so we see a painting that has been turned into a photograph, and then painted from the photograph.
I find it also intriguing that it’s the second time some of the component works have been exhibited in . A previous exhibition by Alys, ‘Antechambres’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, included about 60 of them. So this exhibition at the NPG has itself been through several incarnations – just like the portraits of Fabiola.
When: until 20 September: 10-6 daily, and till 9pm on Thursdays and Fridays
Where: National Portrait Gallery, off Trafalgar Square
How much: free
Photo of a previous installation by Alys at LACMA is by mind on fire on
