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The Quick & the Dead also features self-portraits by each of the artists, revealing how their visions of each other find parallels – or precedents – in their images of themselves. These include a new self-portrait by Hambling in which she emerges out of a swarm of brush marks against a white ground – seeming almost to be made out of paint. Teller’s Father and Son (2003) is a black-and-white photograph of the artist standing naked at his father’s grave, brandishing a beer bottle and football: a profane revel shades into a Baroque memento mori. In a new self-portrait, Lucas traces her image in cigarettes glued to brown paper. Her smiling face hovers above the motif of a skull, woven alike from chopped Marlboros – life rubs up against death. This work, in which the artist is once again constituted out of her very materials, is one of a long-running series of cigarette portraits, one of which (a small work offering a glimpse of her eyes on a torn scrap of paper) hung in the Colony Room Club until its closure in 2008. The Colony Room offers an analogy to the unlikely grouping of artists in this exhibition. The club played host to a motley crowd, diverse in personality, generation, background and reputation (“Don’t be dull and fucking boring” was the one rule, handed down from the club’s founder Muriel Belcher). Bridging ‘Old Soho’ and the art scene of the 1990s, it was always more of a crucible than a club in the typical sense. The artists in The Quick & the Dead seem, at first glance, just such a congeries. They belong in different curatorial boxes. In this respect, however, their portraits not only bear witness to their personal dynamics, but convey something of the breadth and ongoing potential of portraiture itself.
Sarah Lucas, In the words of Sexton Ming Just remember when you smile There’s a skull in there, 2018, brown paper, cigarettes, 140 x 200 cm
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