In September 2006 Stuart Shave Modern Art will exhibit American artist Collier Schorr’s (b. 1963) recently completed five-year project Jens F.

From 1971 until 1985 American artist Andrew Wyeth painted the portrait of his neighbour Helga. A secret between painter and subject until the study finished, the Helga pictures would later become infamous for the intimacy suggested by the realistically rendered nude figure.

Several years later Schorr would find a book of these portraits in a New York bookstore. Struck by the physical similarity of a boy named Jens she had met on a train in Germany in 1996, with Wyeth’s Helga, Schorr began to work directly with both figures. A study of light and form within the boundaries and limitations of a single figure, the Jens F. project pieces together two figures and two landscapes, noting the ways in which national ideologies are expressed through depictions of nature. Re-posing and re-shooting Helga’s postures with Jens’ young male body, Schorr collaged and annotated her own works alongside and on top of prints of Wyeth’s paintings. Like a secret within a secret, Schorr began to add female figures; a doppelganger for Jens, Jens’ sister playing Helga’s little daughter and finally an older woman who bares an uncanny resemblance to Helga. These other women allowed Schorr to explore Jens’ body as a beginning point in the making of a female portrait.

In dissecting the dynamic of Wyeth’s highly charged gaze toward Helga, Schorr addresses the underlying exchange and attribution of power between painter and subject within the history of portraiture. Not only does Schorr look to disentangle the appearance of desire, ownership of image but also the Freudian notion of transference, through which we can see clearly the artist in the face of her subject.

Jens F is published by Steidl, in a first edition of 1000. In 2007 Schorr will have large scale solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, Colorado and also at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany.