ZURICH.- With her highly original and at times provocative practice, Viviane Sassen is one of Europe’s most exciting photographers. In and Out of Fashion is the first full retrospective of her fashion work, which she has developed alongside her work as a practicing artist. Conceived by Sassen herself, in collaboration with her husband, the designer Hugo Timmermans, the exhibition shows a selection of more than 300 photographs from the past seventeen years. It presents a lively installation, combining a range of photographic material, from working snapshots, to magazine spreads, exhibition prints and state-of-the-art projections.
Sassen is widely celebrated for breaking free from many of the clichés of the fashion industry, abandoning a caution induced by commercial constraints for a practice that is both playful and formally inventive. She regards fashion photography as a kind of 'laboratory' working with models, stylists and make-up artists in a process that is both fluid and experimental. Sassen pushes the model’s body to the limits of abstraction, searching out forms that suggest fashion’s relation to other visual modes like collage and sculpture. Her images disrupt traditional formats, utilising strong colours, deep shadows and props such as mirrors to challenge the viewer’s perception. At once performative and highly stylised, Sassen takes fashion photography to the very edge of legibility.
In and Out of Fashion presents an inventive multimedia installation, including a projection that mimics the form of a catwalk itself. Unlike her parallel practice as an artist, much of the exhibition was made on commission, including photographs taken for the advertising campaigns of major fashion houses such as M Missoni, Stella McCartney–Adidas, Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton. The display also includes editorial work for fashion and design magazines, including Pop, i-D, Wallpaper, Purple, Kutt and Dazed & Confused. In these we see the emergence of Sassen’s fashion idiom, perhaps particularly her early experimental collaborations with Emmeline de Mooij, including the series Nudes – A Journey, presented in the exhibition. As De Mooj has noted, the pair worked 'in a sort of dream world', developing their images through free association. Sassen has remained strongly committed to this ethic of spontaneity, a vital resource in reimagining fashion’s codes and conventions.
The exhibition reveals both the collaborative and personal evolution of Sassen's vision, including a collaboration with the top Dutch fashion model, Anna de Rijk, and a series of 36 portraits made with the French stylist, Roxane Danset. A section of the exhibition called Foreplay is devoted to the moments before a fashion shoot begins, revealing Sassen's creative process at its purest. As the exhibition title suggests, Sassen's images dance seductively along a borderline, crossing boundaries and mixing up genres, at once in and out of fashion. In this way she offers a challenge to the industry to become more visually inventive.
The exhibition is curated by Fotomuseum Winterthur in collaboration with Viviane Sassen and Huis Marseille, Amsterdam. It is made possible by the generous support of the Hulda und Gustav Zumsteg-Stiftung, the Zürcherische Seidenindustrie Gesellschaft, the Truus und Gerrit van Riemsdijk Stiftung and the Mondriaan Fonds.
Sassen's work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; and the Centre National des Art Plastiques, Paris. Her publications include Flamboya (Contrasto, 2007), Parasomnia (Prestel, 2011), Die Son Sien Alles (Libraryma, 2012), Roxane (Oodee, 2012), Etan&Me (Odee, London, 2013), Pikin Slee (Prestel, 2014), and UMBRA (Odee, 2014).
An accompanying catalogue, Viviane Sassen: In and Out of Fashion, is published by Prestel with essays by Nanda van den Berg and Charlotte Cotton.
Viviane Sassen (born Amsterdam, 1972), grew up in East Africa before studying fashion design and photography at Hogeschool voor Kunsten Utrecht and fine art at Ateliers Arnhem. Selected solo exhibitions have taken place at Forma in Milan (2009) Foam in Amsterdam (2008) and the Dutch Fotomuseum (2014). Sassen was one of six artists selected for the annual New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 2011. Recent group exhibitions include The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013); No Fashion, Please! Photography between Gender and Lifestyle at the Vienna Kunsthalle (2011); Figure and Ground: Dynamic Landscape at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto as part of the Contact Photography Festival (2011); and Six Yards: Guaranteed Dutch Design at the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (2012). In 2007 Sassen received the first prize of the Prix de Rome, and in 2011 she won the International Center of Photography Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography.
