By Editor Design.nl / 20-07-2010

Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin began their work together in 1986 in Amsterdam. Now, 25 years later, with their campaigns for fashion houses such as YSL, Chanel, Balmain, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Chloé, and with regular publications in W Magazine, Vogue and The New York Times, they are amongst the most important photographers in the world today.

They are amongst the very few artists that have successfully crossed the line drawn between fashion and art and have managed to simultaneously maintain careers in both fields. The team has lived and worked in New York since 1995.

Foam_Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam shows 300 photographs spanning 25 years of the duo’s career. Art, fashion and portrait works all exist next to each other. By disregarding any chronological order the combinations of images are based on personal, formal, social, political and intuitive associations that show the way the artists have lived with the images for 25 years.

Inez van Lamsweerde en Vinoodh Matadin launched their international career with the publication of ten pages in the British magazine The Face in 1994. It was here that for the first time in a fashion series the models and the backgrounds were photographed separately and subsequently combined into a single image by use of a computer. The series typified van Lamsweerde and Matadin’s hyper-realistic style and was made to celebrate and subvert fashion within the context of a magazine.

Dubiousness is at the base of practically every image they make. Their work is ambiguous in every sense of the word and balances deliberately on the thin rope between fashion and art, perverting both worlds, mirroring the strangeness of everyday life through an extreme enlargement of a singular part.

Since each photograph demands its own dimensions, and some have been shown over the years and have their own existing size and frame style, the exhibition will have a dynamic flow and will read like a huge stream of images – forming one flowing, pulsating sentence rather than divisions that are grouped by size or subject. This showing will draw the viewer into Inez and Vinoodh’s world of constant dualism, duality and ambiguity, as well as their obsession with giving meaning to the surface, while oscillating between horror and beauty, the grotesque and the quiet, and the spiritual and the banal.

For the exhibition, a special newspaper was published: Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin ‘Pretty Much Everything’ 1985-2010: 25 photographs + 25 posters with M/M (Paris) / € 7,95. Available in the Foam bookshop and online.

Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin
Pretty Much Everything - photographs 1985-2010
25 June until 15 September 2010

Main image: Anastasia, 1994
Image 1: Joanna, Herve Leger Campaign, 1995
Image 2: Bjork, Poisson Nageur,  2000
Image 3: Delfine, Ad Campaign for Balenciaga in collaboration with MM Paris, 2001
Image 4: Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately), 1999
Photography (c) Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin

Add to favorites