Vanessa Beecroft

Vanessa Beecroft has become famous for installations featuring armies of vaguely similar women wearing identical underwear, high heels, wigs, and not much else. Their nudity becomes almost like a uniform.

Website of the artist.

In an extended series of tableaux vivants, Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft has treated the will to classicism in its diaspora of mass culture through a re-deployment of the fashion industry’s strategic organization of idealized beauty, itself inherited in large part from high art, and in her performances, returned. Models were stripped naked and arranged in art spaces with the rigid planarity of the most exacting quattrocentro painting. Templates of beauty given to the simplicity and grandeur of ancient marbles, these tableaux modernized classicism by signing flesh with flesh in a closer iconicity, posing philosophical questions about the plausibility of an art that is at once critical—even virulent—in content, yet free from formal fragmentation or will to decrepitude in its means of presentation—critical, in short, of the easy pairings of form and content that have riddled European aesthetics roughly since Manet…

Dare to bare

Beecroft uses a unique, personal, artistic language. Her work is a complex fusion of conceptual issues and aesthetic concerns, focusing on large-scale performance art, usually involving live female models (often nude)…