Mini-retrospective
Performative Painting: LOOK PAINT REPEAT + International Passport Paintings
June 1 -Sept. 2, 2024
GALLERY 235: Harbourfront Centre
235 Queens Quay West
This mini-retrospective covers the last five years of Doreen Wittenbols’ practice, since the multidisciplinary Dutch-Canadian artist launched her first “performative painting” project. In International Passport Paintings, an ongoing initiative that started in 2019, she transforms into a Passport Painting Officer and invites strangers to sit for intimate portrait sessions. The first two interactive performances took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico and Paris, France. “I remember every one of those participants,” Wittenbols says.
International Passport Paintings flips and softens a bureaucratic power dynamic that Wittenbols has encountered frequently in recent years as a nonimmigrant residing in the United States. Subverting the tightly controlled parameters of a passport photo, the artist’s small-scale portraits abstract her subjects’ features, capturing the essence of her gentle interactions with them. In this passport office, no one is turned away. The paintings’ gauzy aesthetic and monochrome tones harken back to the days of analog photography, but Wittenbols’ central point of inspiration for the project is drawn from today’s headlines.
When the United States announced that all American citizens would need to show a passport or a federally regulated “Real ID” to travel by plane in the coming years, Wittenbols set out to question what “real” selfhood actually means. This exploration of identity and freedom continues in Toronto: stationed at her “migration desk,” Wittenbols will swiftly complete eight passport paintings a day with water soluble oil paint on archival paper. She will add the new portraits to a grid of previous works from Santa Fe and Paris, and together with Harbourfront, will eventually mail them back to their subjects. “Just don’t show your passport painting at the border,” says Wittenbols. “It’s not recommended.”
The performative aspect of International Passport Paintings was a major breakthrough for Wittenbols. “I think it has something to do with aging—I am bolder about painting in public,” she says. “I would’ve been too self conscious even ten years ago.” Just as she was honing this radically open creative method, the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world.
During the pandemic Wittenbols found solitary ways to investigate artistic practice as theater, and new methods for reinterpreting her imagery. For Spring Monuments (2020-2021), she situated her own artworks in her garden or studio and painted them from observation, referencing the memento mori and vanitas traditions of 17th century Dutch painting. Mirrors are a recurring motif in Dutch still lifes, and Wittenbols’ “paintings of paintings” can be just as self-reflective—and perception-bending.
“This is me—all of these series I work in are different sides of me,” Wittenbols explains. “They’re lovingly made paintings in a crazy time, and now they’re my souvenirs. But they’re not intended to be replicas of the original works, they’re filtered and changed by time, space, and probably some garden soil.”
In recent years, Wittenbols has also combined her diminutive paintings and sculptures into large-scale installations, as seen in the immersive mixed-media works Happening (2023), New Skin for the Old Ceremony (2020), and Paintings for our Mothers (2021). These life-size domestic tableaux function as stages for the artist and her viewers to encounter, dissect, and invert entrenched tropes of gender and sexuality.
During her exhibition at Harbourfront Centre, Wittenbols will be a near-constant presence in the gallery space, continuing to “look, paint, repeat” from her own art and installations on display. She will also test new directions in her practice, leaving her in-progress experiments on view and plunging us into her migrating studio.
Interview & text by Jordan Eddy [Editor, Curator, Friend]
photo: Joshua Shing Ho Hon @honshingho