Garbo es Garbo (Diptych)
Tabakalera, San Sebastian – Bilbao 2025 – 2026
Greta Garbo still belongs to that moment in cinema when the apprehension of the human countenance plunged crowds into the greatest perturbation, where people literally lost themselves in the human image as if in a philter, when the face constituted a sort of absolute state of the flesh which one could neither attain nor abandon.
Barthes, Roland “The Face of Garbo”, Mythologies (1972)
Garbo’s face-as-object, as Barthes put it, and its effect on audiences only make the myth and the mystery grow, even today. In Queen Christina’s (1933) final shot the camera approaches her motionless visage without even blinking: she is simply being. Like a kind of mask, it is effectively working as a blank canvas onto which we can project our thoughts and fantasies about the character’s ending. An ambiguous end tailored for Garbo’s ambiguous persona.
Against this backdrop, and together with the fascination for what happens in front and behind the camera, Garbo es Garbo (Diptych) originated with the creation of a T-shirt featuring Greta Garbo’s face on the front and the words “Garbo es Garbo” on the back. Jacob Lambrecht and I conceived it as a reaffirmation of the iconic and as an expression of our appreciation for the direct use of images and words. The wooden structures that make up the diptych are arranged in such a way that both images cannot be seen simultaneously, encouraging the viewers to walk around them and fostering a more contemplative—and therefore more complete—reading of the work. This front-back dynamic, which echoes the front and back of the T-shirt as a kind of canvas, together with the jumping body, functions as a set of “faces,” all reinforced by the theatrical, set-like quality of the wooden structures.
