INEZ & VINOODH

INEZ & VIDOODH

Partners in life and work for twenty-five years, Inez & Vinoodh were among the first photographers to harness the full potential of digital manipulation in portraying the human condition. Combining the beautiful with the bizarre, the elegant with the extreme, the classical with camp, their edgy images depict human identity as exquisite corpse, the spirit of transformation that has fueled the march of art history and which has become, more than ever a sustaining aesthetic principle of our own time. Beginning in the early 1990s, they have treated a myriad of genres (nude, portrait, still life, tableau), producing images for art, fashion and popular culture as well as experimental montage and assemblage. Using the digital medium as the very tool of the uncanny, Inez & Vinoodh seek ever new ways to suggest the complex internal dynamics that lie beneath appearances, mapping contemporary beauty in all its guises from the classical to the utterly extreme.

PRESS RELEASE

The world famous Dutch photographer duo Inez& Vinoodh’s first ever exhibition in Turkey will be presented by ISTANBUL’74 in collaboration with Gagosian Gallery New York, at ISTANBUL’74‘s art space in İstanbul, Karaköy.

Basically every picture we take is a self-portrait—a picture of how we feel at that moment in our lives.
—Inez & Vinoodh

Partners in life and work for twenty-five years, Inez & Vinoodh were among the first photographers to harness the full potential of digital manipulation in portraying the human condition. Combining the beautiful with the bizarre, the elegant with the extreme, the classical with camp, their edgy images depict human identity as exquisite corpse, the spirit of transformation that has fueled the march of art history and which has become, more than ever a sustaining aesthetic principle of our own time. Beginning in the early 1990s, they have treated a myriad of genres (nude, portrait, still life, tableau), producing images for art, fashion and popular culture as well as experimental montage and assemblage. Using the digital medium as the very tool of the uncanny, Inez & Vinoodh seek ever new ways to suggest the complex internal dynamics that lie beneath appearances, mapping contemporary beauty in all its guises from the classical to the utterly extreme.

Among the permutations and combinations of images both familiar and new, Inez & Vinoodh introduce the first of their starkly beautiful flower photographs. Revivifying a genre that begins with their own passion for flowers and the elaborate still life paintings of their Dutch forbears, and continues in the work of contemporary masters such as Robert Mapplethorpe, Irving Penn, and Nobuyushi Araki, they have made it distinctly their own. Capturing the particularity of individual blooms with analytical precision, they subject them to an anthropomorphizing gesture whereby the flowers, like many of the people they photograph, become choreographic figures against neutral white fields. For their first presentation ever in Istanbul, they have installed individual photographs in such a way as to create momentary associations between different epochs, subjects and origins in their oeuvre, and abstract equivalences between people, places, and things.