Ink on wood, diptych
Collection Ginette Moulin / Guillaume Houzé, Paris
Galerie Art : Concept, Paris
© Fabrice Gousset
What could be more natural for a painter who likes to dip into the history of her medium than to turn her attention to the famous forger Elmyr de Hory, the very same character who inspired Orson Welles’s F for Fake? Whitney Bedford reinterprets existing images to the point of completely reappropriating them; to do this she blends both drawing and painting in her canvases, offering several overlapping versions that form but a single image in the end. Here Bedford creates a portrait of the man who flooded the art market with fakes for twenty years. Two different images make up the diptych, one of which proclaims that it is in fact a fake, thus muddling the idea of authenticity since both are by the very same hand.