Justin Liam O’Brien’s self-portrait Pride (2024) takes its inspiration from one of the works featured in his Semiose exhibition All Sunsets Risen. It is the artist’s very first lithograph, produced at the Idem studio in Paris as a limited edition of 40 copies. In this Mannerist-inspired work, the artist turns his gaze on himself in the same way he views the people he portrays in his work, seeking to balance fidelity to the model with a certain idealization. In Pride, he generates psychological tension through the juxtaposition of his body with the architecture and the darkened landscape of the background. As a counterpoint to the artist’s raised face, a hand holds a burning match, a symbol of both hope and defiance.

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