INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE AND VINOODH MATADIN

INEZ VAN LAMSWEERDE AND VINOODH MATADIN
Inez van Lamsweerde—The Gentlewoman, 2010
Pigment Print on watercolor paper
40 x 32 1/2 inches  (101.6 x 82.6 cm)
Ed. of 5

Basically every picture we take is a self-portrait—a picture of how we
feel at that moment in our lives.
—Inez & Vinoodh
Gagosian Gallery is pleased to present a major exhibition of
photographs by Inez & Vinoodh, following their first exhibition with
the gallery in Paris earlier this year.
Partners in life and work for twenty-five years, Inez & Vinoodh were
among the first photographers to harness the full potential of digital
manipulation in portraying the human condition. Combining the
beautiful with the bizarre, the elegant with the extreme, the
classical with camp, they depict human identity as exquisite corpse,
the spirit of transformation that has fueled the march of art history
and which has become, more than ever, a sustaining aesthetic principle
of our own time. Beginning in the early 1990s, they have embraced and
updated classical genres (nude, portrait, still life), inspired by
hyperrealism and Pop art. Photographs created independent of
commercial commissions and magazine editorials are genre-melding and
boundary-riding in form and representation. Using the digital medium
as the very tool of the uncanny, Inez & Vinoodh suggest the complex
internal dynamics that lie beneath appearances, mapping postmodern
beauty in all its guises from the classical to the utterly extreme.
Embracing a passion for flowers and the iconographically charged
still-life paintings of their Dutch heritage, Inez & Vinoodh have
produced a series of lush yet edgy flower photographs, compositions of
strange beauty more akin to the heightened mannerist genre of Karl
Blossfeldt, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Nobuyoshi Araki than to classical
nature studies. Envisaging these botanical ensembles with an approach
that is both idiosyncratic and exquisitely precise, they imbue mere
flowers with the force of human subjects.

Portraits taken over the last fifteen years juxtapose the famous with
the lesser or little known—from legendary actors and actresses Sophia
Loren, Clint Eastwood, Vanessa Redgrave, and Tilda Swinton, to the
anonymous innocence of a picture-perfect baby. All reflect the
complicity established with the photographers, and the decisiveness
with which Inez & Vinoodh capture, distill, and sometimes even
sublimate the individual characters. Lady Gaga is a cyborg in mirrored
shades with amphibian scars; then a slouching punk in a grubby
t-shirt. A strangely inert Natalie Portman sports a black goatee
literally powdered with make-up onto the photographic surface of her
lunar complexion; a male hand tugs at her brow to wrest expression
from her blank beauty as an allusion to the invention and control
required for both acting and photography. Some images—from Stephanie
Seymour's siren gaze to Mickey Rourke's rugged heft—are utterly modern
and candid, while nude studies of topical fashion models form a
taxonomy of postmodern female archetypes.
Inez & Vinoodh’s photographic imaginings, whether one or many steps
removed from reality, frequently involve casting the subject in an
unfamiliar pose or guise, with further manipulations in
post-production.  A bare-chested Ed Ruscha poses in awkward pin-up but
with a knowing smile and Bill Murray sprouts daisies from his beard,
revealing the whimsy beyond the deadpan of his on-screen characters,
while the ideally formed Carmen Kass transforms into a three-headed
beast from an unwritten fable. With their preference for disturbance
and displacement, Inez & Vinoodh work to unsettle the real and make
the familiar ever strange.
Inez & Vinoodh were born in 1963 and 1961, respectively, in Amsterdam,
The Netherlands. They met while studying art and photography. Since
beginning to work together in the late 1980s, they have created images
for many leading international brands in luxury and fashion, as well
as regular editorial features for magazines such as i-D, Interview,
Purple, Pop, Vanity Fair, Vogue USA, Vogue China, Paris Vogue, Vogue
Hommes International, Vogue Italia, Another Magazine, Gentlewoman,
Visionaire, V, V Man, and W. Their retrospective project Pretty Much
Everything is the most comprehensive record of their work to date. The
catalogue published by Taschen is a magnificent limited-edition book
in three volumes, designed by M/M Paris with essays by Glenn O'Brien,
Michael Bracewell, Bruce Sterling, and others. The extensive
travelling exhibition of the same name—which mirrors the book and
juxtaposes images of all genres and formats—is updated with new
material at each new showing. "Pretty Much Everything" opened at FOAM,
Amsterdam in 2010, traveling to Sao Paulo in 2011, and Dallas
Contemporary, Texas in 2012. The trade edition of Pretty Much
Everything is currently in preparation.
Inez & Vinoodh live and work in New York.