Currently the Foam Fotografiemuseum ( Photography museum) is presenting an exhibition of the stunning work by the photographic duo of Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. The exhibition is titled: Pretty Much Everything. It shows approximately 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.
Pretty Much Everything is on view from the 25th of June untill September 2010 in Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam.
Photos Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin | M/M (Paris) | source: Foam Fotografiemuseum