Oil on canvas

The original concept of the Mental Handicap Project exhibited in 1976 was as one of four parts of a series on ‘Relationships: Attitudes Towards Love’ titled Love and Tragedy. Lenkiewicz’s continuing interest was in the disadvantaged and ostracized sections of society. He started a large notebook on the history of mental and physical disability, including many detailed pen and ink drawings. These were often based on Velázquez’s paintings of the jesters and dwarfs in the seventeenth century court of Philip IV of Spain.

The painting appears as Item E in the exhibition list with the caption:

This person is physically handicapped, he is not mentally handicapped.

Lenkiewicz referenced the so-called ‘character heads’ of the eighteenth-century German–Austrian sculptor Franz Xaver Messerschmidt (1736–1783) for his Self-Portrait (after Franz Xaver Messerschmidt) (1976).

The painting appears as Item A in the exhibition list with the caption:

This person is “NORMAL”. He/She is not mentally handicapped. Price: £Very expensive but always available at a price.

Shown at the 1996 exhibition of restored and reworked paintings on the theme of vagrancy. 29 January–30 April 1996, The Annexe, 19 Citadel Ope, The Barbican, Plymouth.

‘What you see is nothing, the head manufactures the world.
It takes a lunatic to find out what is really going on. You are now talking to a lunatic, sir! A lunatic is someone who takes an interest in something no one else takes an interest in. For the rest there is no escape.’
Albert Fisher, known as ‘Bishop’, a vagrant

‘We’re all vagrants in the sense that we’re not here to stay.’
Terry Goldstone, political activist