FRANCESCA WOODMAN | FACE, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND

In this complex and psychologically-loaded self-portrait, Francesca Woodman fully cropped her head of out the frame and supplanted it by a strategically-placed mask. Of this image, Lorenzo Fusi writes: ‘A white mask, a coarse cast from an androgynous face, hides the epicenter of the image, that is to say the artist sex in the foreground. The fire, the heart, the encounter between Cartesian axis – as well as the reason itself for the pose Woodman chose – are denied to us, even though the orifices on the mask function as powerful semantic detonators, their cavities a clear metaphor of the clefts in the female body . . . [her] “symbolic” body represent[s] the annihilation of the individuality of each woman to the eyes of a man, in the moment in which his gaze concentrates on her sexual organs only’ (‘You Cannot See Me from Where I Look at Myself: the Mask in Francesca Woodman’s Work,’ in Marco Pierini, Francesca Woodman, pp. 174-5).