Hellen Van Meene
Since the mid-1990s, Hellen van Meene has garnered attention for her staged, yet intimate, photographs of adolescent girls and androgynous boys. Her formal and lighting sensibility is partially informed by her Dutch predecessors like Johannes Vermeer and she originally chose her subjects within her hometown of Alkmaar. However, within the last decade she has gathered models from abroad, notably Germany and Japan. In 2004 she introduced teenage mothers and mothers-to-be from Russia, Latvia, and the United Kingdom into her coterie of subjects in the midst of palpable coming-of-age turning points. For the series Going My Own Way Home (2007), van Meene addressed the visual, economic, and cultural context of her sitters more directly than in her prior series, integrating the panoramic format and still lifes alongside her characteristic portraits to capture the inhabitants of an impoverished post-Hurricane Katrina neighborhood in New Orleans.
Solo exhibitions of van Meene's work have been organized by Sadie Coles HQ in London, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Folkwang Museum in Essen, and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions at Gemeente Museum Den Haag, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Courtesy of the Guggenheim …
Since the mid-1990s, Hellen van Meene has garnered attention for her staged, yet intimate, photographs of adolescent girls and androgynous boys. Her formal and lighting sensibility is partially informed by her Dutch predecessors like Johannes Vermeer and she originally chose her subjects within her hometown of Alkmaar. However, within the last decade she has gathered models from abroad, notably Germany and Japan. In 2004 she introduced teenage mothers and mothers-to-be from Russia, Latvia, and the United Kingdom into her coterie of subjects in the midst of palpable coming-of-age turning points. For the series Going My Own Way Home (2007), van Meene addressed the visual, economic, and cultural context of her sitters more directly than in her prior series, integrating the panoramic format and still lifes alongside her characteristic portraits to capture the inhabitants of an impoverished post-Hurricane Katrina neighborhood in New Orleans.
Solo exhibitions of van Meene's work have been organized by Sadie Coles HQ in London, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Folkwang Museum in Essen, and Fotomuseum Winterthur. Her work has also been included in major group exhibitions at Gemeente Museum Den Haag, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Courtesy of the Guggenheim Museum
Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York, NY
Gallery Koyanagi, Tokyo, Japan
