After the introductory room, the next two are devoted to the inner border—beginning with one’s own image in the form of the self-portrait.
It is the search for the border through introspective vision, that which led the German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte to write:
“Turn your gaze away from everything that surrounds you, and look within yourself.”

For this reason, the border is sought in the descent within oneself, through a series of self-portraits by Edvard Munch, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, and then two German-speaking artists who, in the early twentieth century, experienced that same burning of being: Ferdinand Hodler and, above all, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner.
To depict one’s own face meant entering into contact with the depth of a border that was sinking ever further inward, reaching toward the dimension of the sacred—one that opens the gates of the eternal, yet always bears the scratches of life.

The journey then continues with a gallery of magnificent portraits—from Gustave Courbet to Édouard Manet, from Edgar Degas to Pierre-Auguste Renoir—each revealing that state of suspended, nostalgic silence which defines, as an intimate world, the search within faces for an everyday border.
The very same will be seen, as the exhibition unfolds, in the depiction of the sky—the final expression of the border that the exhibition explores.

This suspension of silence returns, of course, in Amedeo Modigliani, within a wholly new and distinctly twentieth-century pictorial language—before the exhibition pauses meaningfully on two extraordinary figures from the latter half of the century.
These are Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti, represented by a selection of portraits: a border made almost of scorched flesh, of alarmed gazes, in that headlong plunge toward the spasmodic search for one’s inner boundary within the tangled depths of contemporaneity.