Vanessa Beecroft

The work of Vanessa Beecroft is centered on two forms of presentation: performances and drawing. Her artistic concerns come primarily from a series of drawings and a private diary recalling eight years of anorexia. The drawings, immediate and intimate, were used as therapy, in response to her diary.

The day when Vanessa Beecroft decided to make public this period of her life, she selected an audience made up especially of women whom she had seen in the street with for only criterion, physical appearance and a malignant and understanding attitude.

The result suggested something between the theatre of the absurd and the artistic performances of the feminists in the 1970s. These performances, by the duration and the absence of movement, the clothing accessories given to the anonymous protagonists functioning like an outgoing of the identity, provoke within the spectator a destabilizing experiment. The figure / figuration, the phenomenon of voyeurism, the effects of the double in the personalities is immediately perceptible, like many relays of herself or the other.