In some way death in our culture happens offstage in private, but this show looks at the ways in which people have explored death much more face on. --Kate Forde, Curator of "Death: A Self Portrait," The Wellcome Collection, BBC Magazine

Beautifully and thought-provokingly curated by Kate Forde (who also curated the Wellcome's 2009 Exquisite Bodies), the exhibition uses as its base and its muse the extensive, broad, and rather profound death-themed collection of Chicago-based Richard Harris. Harris' collection is comprised of all things death, ranging from valuable artistic masterworks to the lowest-brow of popular culture, bringing to mind the collection of none other than Henry Wellcome, the man behind the Wellcome Collection. To its merit, "Death: A Self Portrait" draws deftly from both extremes as well as all that is located in between; the result is an exhibition that is at a lovely, provocative, fascinating, witty, and thoughtful investigation into the human obsession with imagining and coming to terms with that greatest and most unknown of absolutes: DEATH.

"Death: A Self Portrait" is divided up into five sections: The first, "Contemplating Death," is a collection of memento mori themed work; The second, "The Dance of Death," gathers works responding to notions of the danse macabre or death as the great equalizer; "Violent Death" features a variety of artistic responses to war, including Goya's Disasters of War series; "Commemoration" concerns itself with burial, morning, and our responses the particular dead; My personal favorite, "Eros and Thanatos," is an unusual addition to a public discussion of death, and showcases "works expressing our strange fascination with 'things at the outer limits of life and death, sexuality and pain."

Source:
http://morbidanatomy.blogspot.com/2012/11/death-self-portrait-wellcome-collection.html