Jim Morphesis' big-fisted painting of a skull emerges as the show's emblematic work. As a memento mori, it flirts with cliche, but with its title, "For Miguel de Unamuno II" (1985), Morphesis invokes the Basque writer whose "tragic sense of life" entails a striving for rational truth burdened by awareness of existence as a finally baffling and merciless situation.
Something of that existentialist bleakness pervades the show, as if Selz feels that contemporary art or its audience needs shaking awake from some funk of denial.
Why do we not always see full-face portraiture as beheading, as Nathan Oliveira's late bronze "Masks" mischievously encourage? Does the face or some other aspect of the head enable it to betoken a whole individual as, say, a foot or a knee cannot?Or does the quality of scrutiny, the creative scruple an artwork registers matter most, as two Lucian Freud prints here suggest?"Heads" does not answer such questions. Perhaps no exhibition could. But by dramatic contrasts in style - among Gottfried Helnwein, Sherie Franssen, Alex Kanevsky and others - it reopens them in lively fashion.