"She sees beauty where beauty can be terribly absent."
-Karl Lagerfeld
I saw Vee Speers' portraits at Art Chicago this past weekend. At the show her work was carried by the
Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt, whose main emphasis is on promoting the work of young artists (not sure if Speers quite fits the profile). All the portraits in her "Birthday Party" series are done on C-Print behind diasecon Aludibond.
Vee Speers lives and works in Paris, and the red-light district of the rue St. Denis formed the backdrop for her Bordello series. Deriving her inspiration from the decadence of her surroundings, Speers shot in real bordellos, creating images “between genuine emotion and something more staged…a shift between the real and the surreal.” A companion to the Bordello series is Parisians, inspired by the voyeurism of circus shows. Speers produces her Parisians and Bordello photographs as Fresson carbon prints, giving a sumptuous painterly quality.Vee Speers' most recent work is The Birthday Party, a collection of portraits of children inspired by her daughter's birthday party. Having observed children playing at being adults, Speers imagined what characters they would create if they pushed their role-playing to imaginative extremes. In these photographs she has stripped away the idealistic stereotypes of childhood, capturing them happy to experiment with imperfection and embrace the grotesque. Vee Speers was born in Australia and studied at Queensland College of Art. Her work has been widely exhibited and has been seen in publications including The Sunday Times, Harpers + Queen, Arena, Esquire, and Black and White Magazine. A book of the Bordello series was published in 2004.
I saw Vee Speers' portraits at Art Chicago this past weekend. At the show her work was carried by the Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt, whose main emphasis is on promoting the work of young artists (not sure if Speers quite fits the profile). All the portraits in her "Birthday Party" series are done on C-Print behind diasecon Aludibond.
Vee Speers lives and works in Paris, and the red-light district of the rue St. Denis formed the backdrop for her Bordello series. Deriving her inspiration from the decadence of her surroundings, Speers shot in real bordellos, creating images “between genuine emotion and something more staged…a shift between the real and the surreal.” A companion to the Bordello series is Parisians, inspired by the voyeurism of circus shows. Speers produces her Parisians and Bordello photographs as Fresson carbon prints, giving a sumptuous painterly quality.Vee Speers' most recent work is The Birthday Party, a collection of portraits of children inspired by her daughter's birthday party. Having observed children playing at being adults, Speers imagined what characters they would create if they pushed their role-playing to imaginative extremes. In these photographs she has stripped away the idealistic stereotypes of childhood, capturing them happy to experiment with imperfection and embrace the grotesque. Vee Speers was born in Australia and studied at Queensland College of Art. Her work has been widely exhibited and has been seen in publications including The Sunday Times, Harpers + Queen, Arena, Esquire, and Black and White Magazine. A book of the Bordello series was published in 2004.
