SELF-PORTRAITS / SELFIES

Artist: Jorge Rubio
Class: 1st grade studentes
Related themes: Identity
Mediums: Photography, sculpture, and painting
Teacher: Ainhoa Errazti
Larrea School
Materials: Camera, props, cardboard, and clay

What do selfies have to do with art history? Jorge Rubio invited 18 first grade students from Larrea School in Barakaldo to create a series of self-portraits with different techniques. The starting point was identity: the shaping of our self-image, what we choose to reveal or conceal, how we relate to what we believe we are, what we are, and what others see in us . Based on the history of art, where portraits have been present as a genre throughout several centuries, the students made pictorial, photographic, and three-dimensional representations of themselves. As usual, during the project, the schoolchildren visited the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, in order to work based on direct observation of the works of art. Francis Bacon’s blurred portraits inspired the schoolchildren in their creative process. Therefore, they also decided to take blurred and focused photographs, front and profile views, side-lit portraits, contrasts between figure and ground, trick-portraits that hide certain features or create fantasy figures, and even bas-relief self-portraits in clay.