Yours Truly at Nahmad Contemporary promises the opportunity to stare its exhibiting artists right in the face. It is a self-proclaimed exhibition of self-portraits - a show with a clear prompt, akin to the Ugly Painting group exhibition that ran at the gallery last summer. Like Yours Truly, the prior show was organised by art advisor and collector Eleanor Cayre. Both embody a certain cheeky ethos, playing with the vagueness of their labels to provide a heteroglossic report on the current climate of the art world. Yet this summer’s group show isn’t focused on the power of dirty, messy representation in our era of digitally achieved perfection. Instead, it investigates where an age-old genre stands now on the precipice of art history.

That’s why Yours Truly feels especially zeitgeisty. The advent of good, affordable mirrors spurred on the first wave of panel-painted portraits in the 15th century - and now the advent of good, affordable front-facing phone cameras and self-timer contraptions has deeply influenced the demand for self-portraiture in the 21st century. Now that anyone’s likeness can be captured instantaneously and perhaps even faithfully, the self-portrait is a publicly accessible commodity for anyone to produce and distribute on online channels. One might even call the selfie a marker of our time. At the very least, this evolutionary stage of self-portraiture has undeniably altered the way we fashion, understand and represent ourselves now.

Of course, the artists on the show’s roster need to get creative. As the majority of the works on display were produced in the past two years, there are few strictly traditional self-portraits. On the wall nearest to the gallery’s entrance, Nate Lowman’s 2022 oil-on-linen painting Recalled Sunscreen (Tormented Self Portrait), for A.B. is a scaled-up hyperrealistic depiction of a bottle of Neutrogena® Invisible Daily Defense Sunscreen. Indeed, that product was one of five aerosol sunscreens recalled in 2021 due to containing low levels of the carcinogen benzene. Whether or not it’s been damaged by UV rays, Lowman doesn’t offer up his own face. But what else can we learn about the artist through this object? That Lowman subtitles this piece Tormented Self Portrait and dedicates it to the initials A.B., signals certain coded personal references, perhaps an anecdote or an inside joke lurking beneath the painting’s otherwise innocuous surface. Even without knowing, we can smell the irony in the cancer-preventing product’s recall.

Next door to Lowman’s painting is Issy Wood’s Self Portrait 56, which features a close-up of the artist’s face loosely covered in a tattered golden sheet mask. Like Lowman, Wood uses the vocabulary of modern-day “self-care” products to both reveal and obscure information about herself. Nearby, Jonathan Lyndon Chase’s likeness holds up a paintbrush with a hand adorned by acrylic nails in a painting titled Liminal. He seemingly tags himself as a “soft boy” in the words written below his scribbled-over bust. It’s clear that in the hands of the artist, this theme holds the unique power of self-authorship. It reminds me of the mechanism at the heart of the increasingly popular literary genre of autofiction, which is the necessary freedom to alter and redefine autobiographical details. Once faithful representation is eschewed by the artist’s stylistic approach, a new emotional truth emerges - the same juncture where realism is replaced by expressionism.

That’s why the self-portraits in Yours Truly are not confined to figurative paintings. Among them are installations modified from found objects (like Danny McDonald’s Untitled Self-Portrait), photographs of animals (Heji Shin’s You’ve come a long way, baby!), mixed media collages (Maggie Lee’s Sassy) and drawings completely obscured by gaffer tape (Walter Price’s Anger & Frustration). Works by Berlin-based multidisciplinary artist Marianna Simnett are also on view, alongside contemporary artists Ed Atkins and Arthur Jafa, both of whom are proficient in video art.  There are a surprising number of inanimate objects and personal possessions in the room, which stand as small vessels for selfhood—for example, Martine Syms’ bronze-cast hair weave and Stuart Middleton’s kebab of household garbage. There are altered and fragmented photographs of the self like Wolfgang Tillmans’ casual shot of his foot sticking out into other pairs of shoes and Mark Grotjahn’s self-vandalised selfie. Even artists who tackle straightforward self-portraits leave a personal mark with handmade frames and platforms, as in Louis Eisner’s tiny profile centred in a painted bronze square, or Isa Genzken’s archival polaroids taped up in the window openings of an aircraft panel. Some have chosen to speak directly to visitors in written narratives, via the calligraphic anecdote in Evelyn Taocheng Wang’s It was not normal and John Kelsey’s poetry zine I Forget left out on the gallery’s bench. In every iteration, it seems that we can learn more about the artist from their material decisions than any glimpses we might get of their face.

Even artists who tackle straightforward self-portraits leave a personal mark with handmade frames and platforms, as in Louis Eisner’s tiny profile centred in a painted bronze square, or Isa Genzken’s archival polaroids taped up in the window openings of an aircraft panel.

Yours Truly explores what happens when artist and subject are one and the same. Here, self-portraiture is established as a genre that allows an artist to temper their intimacy with their viewer and we’re exposed to many different levels of closeness in the artwork on display. The title of the show’s reference to an epistolary sign-off invokes the self-portrait’s role of direct address and personal signature. With or without faces, it’s a radical opportunity to get on more familiar terms with the spectre of the artist standing behind each work. If we’re lucky, we might see ourselves in them, too.