id. no. NAME, SURNAME, OVERVIEW. It is one of the world’s most renowned monograms in contemporary art. With her actions she branded the bodies of hundreds of performers, and the mind of thousands of seemingly casual onlookers, orchestrating her sophisticated claim. From the temples of world art, she made the “tableau vivant” of multiple personality disorders contemporary, infecting it with eating disorders, alleged sexism, supposed racism, to deal with the deepest instances of human existence: the desire to be uniform, the violence of the culture of the image, the obsessions linked to the search for perfection of the body, the precariousness of a woman who wavers on heels as high as a statuary stand. Vanessa Beecroft [b. Genoa, 1969 – lives and works in America, first in NY now LA, where she moved after receiving her diploma in Scenography from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera] has made the silent body, the body living,, her preferred artistic medium, by multiplying it endlessly and directing it to oscillate between absolute negation and absolute contemplation of itself. To date her artistic “corpus” consists of 83 performances - in which she has also involved her photography, her sculpture, her videography and a considerable number of drawings with dry and nervous gesture, an aspect less known, yet fundamental to all her work because each performance embodies a mental picture - whose titles are strictly affixed with her initials and a sequential, serial number, starting from 1993 VB01, in the historic Galleria Inga-Pin in Milan: 30 girls dressed in synthetic wigs and her own brightly coloured clothing lingering around a series of designs scattered on the ground and a diary, her - “Despair. The book of food” - in which she had been taking notes for years, day after day, the quantity, the colour and the emotional burden - from guilt to repulsion - of each of the foods ingested. Since then, the bodies have been multiplied, elongated and refined, the performance has tightened the narrative thread and expanded to the limit of carnal exhaustion, the executions of the work necessary for the performance act have become increasingly prestigious - from a haute-couture that urges to provide her with the most high heels and the most scant lingerie, to set photographers of the calibre of Armin Linke and Harmony Korine - allowing the amplification not only of a planetary media echo, but above all a two-voice counterpoint - “the individual Self vs. the social Self”- the one in elegant embarrassment opposite the other. It is starting from that embarrassment, and her unmistakable gesture - radical and intelligent, elegant, gruelling - that Vanessa Beecroft leads her magnificent silent army to a revolution on an equal footing. Represented in Italy by Galleria Lia Rumma [Naples, Milan], Vanessa Beecroft has exhibited her work in major museums and at art biennials around the world, including the Venice Biennale [2015, 2007, 1997], São Paulo [2002] and the Whitney Museum [NY, 2000]; the National Gallery in London [2006] and the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin [2005]; the Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain in Paris [1998, 1995] and the Fondation Louis Vuitton [2007]; the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice [2001] and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York [1998], as well as in emblematic places such as, among others, the Fish Market in Naples [2010], JFK Airport in New York [2004] and the Doge’s Palace of Genoa, as an inaugural event for the G8 [2001]. A bio-aesthetic, her own, disruptive and formally perfect - as only a great artist and/or a control-freak knows how to put in place - that continues to be the subject of documentaries, publications and interviews on an international scale¹. ¹ For a selection of references on the subject see Mediateca, page 78 “What I do is place people in front of a mirror, because I want them to feel lost, just as if that mirror was a wall. It is precisely that wall, that distance that I fight” VB nome d’arte 52
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