Viviane Sassen
Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen has garnered parallel critical acclaim as a fashion photographer and in the context of contemporary visual art. Having spent several years of her childhood in a Kenyan village, she has travelled extensively in Africa over the past twelve years making work characterized by geometric shapes, abstraction of bodies, bright sunlight, and dark shadows. "To me, Africa is vivid colours and strong contrasts of light and dark," she says. "I remember looking at women and children sitting under the trees sheltering from the sun and, even as a child, seeing these graphic shapes."
Her 2015 solo exhibition at ICA London focused predominantly on a body of work that Sassen made in Pikin Slee, the second-largest village on the Upper Suriname River, deep within the Surinamese rainforest. Her eye was caught by the Saramacca's very traditional way of living, combined with the more mundane objects which seemed to seep through daily life. The exhibition consisted of black and white and colour works shot on an analogue camera. Sassen's series of abstract compositions and elusive subjects are an exploration of the beauty of the everyday, an investigation of the sculptural qualities of the ordinary.
Solo exhibitions of Sassen’s work …
Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen has garnered parallel critical acclaim as a fashion photographer and in the context of contemporary visual art. Having spent several years of her childhood in a Kenyan village, she has travelled extensively in Africa over the past twelve years making work characterized by geometric shapes, abstraction of bodies, bright sunlight, and dark shadows. "To me, Africa is vivid colours and strong contrasts of light and dark," she says. "I remember looking at women and children sitting under the trees sheltering from the sun and, even as a child, seeing these graphic shapes."
Her 2015 solo exhibition at ICA London focused predominantly on a body of work that Sassen made in Pikin Slee, the second-largest village on the Upper Suriname River, deep within the Surinamese rainforest. Her eye was caught by the Saramacca's very traditional way of living, combined with the more mundane objects which seemed to seep through daily life. The exhibition consisted of black and white and colour works shot on an analogue camera. Sassen's series of abstract compositions and elusive subjects are an exploration of the beauty of the everyday, an investigation of the sculptural qualities of the ordinary.
Solo exhibitions of Sassen’s work have taken place at FORMA in Milan, Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, and FOAM in Amsterdam, among other venues. She has been included in group shows at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Vienna Kunsthalle, and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto. Sassen was included in the main exhibition of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. She was awarded the Dutch art prize, the Prix de Rome, in 2007, and in 2011 won the International Center of Photography in New York's Infinity Award for Applied/Fashion/Advertising Photography.
Courtesy of ICA London
