It’s not an image you’re likely to forget: a zoom-in of peachy-pink lips pinched apart and wedged with a papery cut-out of the bell-shaped head of the carnivorous pitcher plant, Nepenthes alata. This equally suggestive and disturbing composition is one of nearly 60 photographs and collages by Viviane Sassen — currently on display as part of her mid-career survey Hot Mirror at The Hepworth Wakefield — that foreground the Dutch artist and photographer’s tendency to push photography to its limits. The composite photograph Nepenthes alata (titled after the plant) spotlights Sassen’s endlessly experimental approach to image-making and her characteristic ability to combine reality with fantasy.
Although Sassen is arguably best known as a fashion photographer, shooting campaigns for the likes of Miu Miu, Stella McCartney and Louis Vuitton, Hot Mirror reveals the surrealistic inspirations and poetic qualities omnipresent in her art photography. These images, which frequently combine photography with collage and painting techniques, warrant more than a quick glance; they compel the viewer to look again and again, to peel off the layers in order to unearth a multitude of artistic references and universal themes packaged in imaginative forms. For example, Yellow Vlei (2014), which pictures a square of amber perspex hovering in the African desert, is intended to be a photographic representation of Kazimir Malevich’s groundbreaking modernist painting, Black Square (1915). For Sassen, the abstract shape — the square — operates as a point of reflection, where fear and longing can be projected. Certainly, abstraction is a common theme in her work: in another image, from her series, Roxane II (with muse and stylist Roxanne Danset), the curvature of a knee is cropped and positioned against an electric blue sky like a mysterious monument.
The surrealist inclination in her work is palpable not only through her deliberate cropping and use of abstract shapes, but also through her tendency to take objects out of context, and warp and make strange the familiarity of the human form. Bodies are slathered in unctuous impasto, limbs are multiplied and nipples are repositioned and repurposed in perplexing re-imaginings of the body and its parts — best seen in her most recent series Of Mud and Lotus (2017). Meanwhile, the egg — an object that famously features in the surrealist works of Man Ray, Salvador Dali and Georges Bataille — pops up in Sassen’s images too, such as in Three Planets (2017), as a form that is both common and strange. The fantastical quality of her work is augmented by a concurrent exhibition of surrealist photographer Lee Miller at The Hepworth also. Both image-makers demonstrate a capacity for unexpected combinations and a purposeful use of light and shadow. Indeed, for Sassen, shadows suggest the complexity of human character — the dark flip-side of the cultivated persona. Throughout her corpus, shadows exist in sharp relief to brightly lit backgrounds and startling, fluorescent colour.
The photographer regards her pictures to be “almost like words” and when placed alongside another image “they create a kind of poem”. Frequently, her photographs can be read as fragments of a larger story — a story that continually changes depending on the ways in which the images are presented. For example, the photograph Coffin — from her early series Flamboya (2004-2008), an ode to her childhood spent in Kenya — depicts a man carrying a crudely carved coffin through a barren landscape. The image encapsulates Sassen’s ability to capture a moment in time devoid of narrative details, but all the more powerful because of it.
Sassen describes her approach to photography as a type of “magical thinking”. This ethos is evident in Hot Mirror — her work is intuitive, multi-layered, and sensual. Sassen’s highly original photography is further contextualised in an accompanying exhibition catalogue published by Prestel, which contains an interview with the artist and an essay by the exhibition’s curator, Eleanor Clayton. Both exhibition and catalogue emphasise the otherworldly, brilliantly-hued and boundary-pushing nature of her work. Never obvious or predictable, Sassen abstracts and cuts through the commonplace to create dazzling images that wink with playfulness and possibility.
Viviane Sassen: Hot Mirror runs through to 7 October at The Hepworth Wakefield. The exhibition catalogue is now available from Prestel.