Inez van Lamsweerde at Matthew Marks - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In her first one-person exhibit in the U.S., Dutch-born artist Inez van Lamsweerde drew upon strategies from fashion photography as well as concerns to art history to exhibit visually striking C-prints with disquieting overtones. Van Lamsweerde's masterful manipulation of color, composition and metaphor accrues in images with the highly polished sophistication and self-consciousness that are thus prominent in both art and fashion today. It approachs as no surprise that the artist attended the fashion academy practice for two years in Amsterdam before going upon to the Rietveld Academy of Art and a one-year residency at fresh York's P.S. 1.

Three large photographs upon view comprise a series called "The Widow." In each, the same 8-year-old girl is made up attired, propp and pos to insinuate various iconic, asexual figures that have been depicted completely through the history of art. In Kirsten, a separate, smaller work that the viewer collisioned before entering the main gallery, the young model's face fills the entire frame. The eerie perfection of her features together with the slickness of van Lamsweerde's technique sent on the outside simultaneous signals about sexuality, religious ecstasy and death. Kirsten's heavily dusted white skin, her shiny purs r lips and her organ of sights closed except for a slit of white at the bottom, are spellbinding in ways that are sinister as well as titillating -- not unlike jiffys in David Lynch's films or high-fashion advertising campaigns that have flirted with death.

As is the case with Kirsten, the three "Widow" works (titled White, R and Black) gainsay viewers the comfort of any clear-cut interpretation. The 8-year-old's heavy-lidded gaze, for example, reminds individual as much of the emotionally unengaged gazes presented by models in fashion spreads as of the martyred expressions of the Virgin Mary and other saints portrayed in religious art above the centuries. Van Lamsweerde makes regard to this remote past and manner of picture-making with various tokens and details -- the light-blue bird perched on the "black" the disembodied hand with r nail polish that clutches a headless doll adorned in white bridal lace. These reminders of a departed representational system collide with the in-your-face materiality of the artist's contemporary photographic sensibility. Ambivalence laced with sensuality is the result of van Lamsweerde's pillage of art history, her stylized photography and herimmersion in the visual territory of fashion culture

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