Writer, Sheila Heti: To end one's life looking like a warrior, somebody who's looked at life straight on, who hasn’t lived in a fantasy world, I see all that in these later self-portraits.
Curator, Starr Figura: Kollwitz would've been 67 years old when she made this work. And you can almost see her connection to the emotion that she’s feeling in the traces of touch that come through in her drawing, especially, for example, in the finger smears that she uses to create the shadows beneath her eyes.
She always looks at herself as honestly as she can in her self-portraits. I think that comes from this sense of purpose. She seems to just constantly be asking herself, who am I now, at every stage, and what can I be doing to make a difference?
Printmaker, Rob Swainston: She’s very direct and I think we’re in a time that we should not dismiss that. We have to look at things head-on.
Artist, Wolfgang Tillmans: Her call for humanism, even though it was drowned out in another World War is still heard today.
Therapist, Emily Price: What she’s able to do is bear witness and encourage us to feel feelings that we really don't wanna feel. But if we don’t feel them, it’s sort of like not listening to an alarm that’s going off. It’s a reminder of our own ability to create violence or pain or suffering and then how much joy and love and compassion we want to choose to create whenever we can.