The series "Three self portrait images" (3 sheets)
Manipulating his own and other artists’ works by translating them into other languages is a common practice in Yuri Albert’s art. In the early 1990s he created a series of works, which were both a reference to his projects with self-portraits and a tribute to Gerhardt Richter's famous series "48 Portraits", in which famous people from culture and science are depicted. Yuri Albert made a series of portraits of friends from plastic mosaics, using the same range of colors, so that all the faces look rather homogeneous. From this series he has now taken his self-portrait and has "decomposed" it into three parts: a drawing, a "pictorial" copy and a "cast" of the surface relief made in the technique of frottage. The drawing is a working model – a drawing of the future image, some sort of set-up instructions attached to a bunch of colored plastic elements. The speckled scheme denoting the color range of the image in progress is complemented by areas of parts of the picture that are already ready marked with a ballpoint pen. The relief, obtained by frottage, turns the portrait into an abstract work, in which the contours of the space between the tesserae in the mosaic retain a hint of the structure of the image hidden underneath the shading. The artist involves the viewer in the old game of equalizing three different images, like Joseph Kossuth in the canonical conceptual composition "One and Three Chairs". In an old interview Yuri Albert admitted: "The image of the artist which arises in the audience's mind is my work." It is no coincidence that, when commenting on this project, he declared: "I openly confess that I hid the message here. I turn everything inside out all the time."