Inside the Outside

An Encounter between Two Humans: A Painter and a Refugee

Ruprecht von Kaufmann (b. Munich, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) is widely regarded as a leading exponent of contemporary narrative painting. When he began work on his series of portraits Inside the Outside, images of refugees arriving in droves were all over the media. Hoping to understand what drives people to leave their homes and undertake a dangerous journey toward a new life in a foreign country, the artist invited refugees to his studio and painted them. A portrait in oil is a status symbol. I wanted to harness this symbolic power to put faces on some of the people behind the anonymous television footage. The resulting twenty-six paintings will be on display at the United Nations headquarters in New York in early 2019. Released in advance of the exhibition, this book, also titled Inside the Outside, showcases the unusual project. In addition to the twenty- six paintings and the sitters’ stories, it contains essays by the Chechen journalist Maynat Kurbanova and the Italian director Michele Cinque, whose personal perspectives add to this deeply moving exploration of the issue.