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John Coplans
Self-Portrait (Upside Down, No. 1), 1992

Although now best known as a photographer, Coplans had a long and successful career as a painter, curator, educator, and art critic before taking up the camera at the age of sixty. First as a critic and later as editor-in-chief of Artforum, he wrote about the most significant artists of the 1960s and 1970s, including Ellsworth Kelly and Phillip Guston.

Coplans’s self-portraits mark a departure from the more conceptual and intellectual art he promoted in previous decades, and correspond to the turn toward explorations of the body and self in the art of the late 1970s. He considers the marks and wrinkles on his body a record of his life history, which he carefully transcribes in his photographs. Reminiscent of topographical landscapes, these unidealized nudes transform his hairy, aging body into a strangely transfixing and often abstract territory of sags and crags.

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Self-Portrait (Upside Down, No. 1)
Artist name
John Coplans
Date created
1992
Classification
photograph
Medium
gelatin silver print
Dimensions
84 1/8 in. (213.68 cm)
Date acquired
1994
Credit
Collection SFMOMA
Accessions Committee Fund purchase
Copyright
© Estate of John Coplans
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/94.154.A-C
Artwork status
Not on view at this time.

Other Works by John Coplans

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