The Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle is offering a season dedicated to women artists from February 16 to May 26, 2019 with six artists presented – Viviane Sassen, Sophie Bouvier Ausländer, Smith, Laura Letinsky, Lili Erzinger and Sandrine Pelletier – who question the world and his representations through a prism that integrates the question of gender.
Here is today the exhibition dedicated to Viviane Sassen.
In fairy tales, the mirror is the symbol of a doorway to another world. Dutch artist Viviane Sassen (1972) sees her photographic work as a mirror, a way to evoke the dream world and to seize its subconscious from moments of everyday life. The exhibition, which brings together work done over the past ten years, composes an unexpected narrative of the work of this artist very noticed on the international scene, and which is akin to self-portraiture.
Photography allows her to capture the strange, the magical and the wonderful and also to affirm a feminine point of view. Favoring experimentation, the artist, who is also a renowned fashion photographer, plays with the body, observes it from sometimes unexpected angles. Her tools are the forms and colors, shade and light. Each of her compositions forms a open and moving world, floating, returning to the extraordinary then same as the artist captures scenes found in everyday life.
In the Hot Mirror exhibition, Sassen’s series mingle: we find photographs of Flamboya, made in Kenya where Sassen lived during three years when she was a child, those of Parasomnia who evoke the feeling shift when one is between waking and sleeping, those of UMBRA which is an exploration on the theme of the physical and psychological shadow, and her most recent series Of Mud and Lotus, where the transformation works by collage or painting symbolizes themes that are dear ones, motherhood and fertility.
Finally, Sassen invites us into her captivating world with TOTEM, a immersive installation made of moving images and a mirror. Here the presence of visitors immersed in an infinite landscape and transformed into shadows, interacts with the projection of the artist who disorients once again. So the visual poems of Sassen are such mirrors referring to the viewer her questions rather than her answers.
The exhibition is produced by the MBAL and the British Museum The Hepworth Wakefield. It is accompanied by a book published in English at Prestel editions. The artist is represented by Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.
Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle
Marie-Anne-Calame 6
2400 Le Locle – Switzerland
