Ben Uri presents an online exhibition curated by Rachel Schultz, an American intern spending a semester in London at Ben Uri, that focuses on 20 immigrant artists through their self-portraits. These works all come from the collection of the late Ruth Borchard (1910-2000), who collected self-portraits from well-known and emerging artists throughout her lifetime.
Her original collection spanned some 100 British born or British-based artists. After her death in 2000, the Ruth Borchard Foundation created the Next Generation Collection, which has expanded her body of work to encompass a younger generation of artists. The Foundation sponsors a highly regarded competition every two years to encourage and recognise the importance of self portraiture within the artist's’ oeuvre.
As a German-Jewish refugee to Britain arriving in London from Hamburg, Germany in 1938, her collection, as her website explains, conveys a sense of the mysterious paradoxes of identity and reflects the journeys of various individuals and their experiences immigrating to Britain.
The uniqueness of the Ruth Borchard Collection is not simply that it is solely ‘self portraits’. The sub-context to the visuality of the works is that it allows us entry into the lives of the artists and, in this selection, the life experiences of émigré artists from across many different continents.
