Brighten up the year: Viviane Sassen’s eye-blazing visions – in pictures

A new retrospective tracks the Dutch artist’s journey from childhood memories in Kenya to her recent wild surrealist creations

Early Works, 1999-2000

The Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP) is putting on France’s first retrospective of work by the Dutch artist Viviane Sassen. Phosphor: Art & Fashion focuses on two main themes: the importance of intimacy in her work and an incessant search for new photographic forms. Objects from her personal archives (in particular her sketchbook from art school), her first self-portraits, and her end-of-studies photographic project reveal the origins of Sassen’s visual language. Viviane Sassen: Phosphor: Art & Fashion 1990-2023 is at MEP in Paris, France until 11 February

Photograph: Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

Self Portrait, 1990

For the first time, Sassen is presenting an important ensemble of self-portraits taken in the 1990s, when she herself was working as a model and frequently posed for photographers. This experience inspired Sassen to begin making self-portraits to reclaim her body and image. You can read more about this image in our Big Picture series

Photograph: Viviane Sassen/MEP

I Sat On Something That Reminded Me of You, 2002

In some of these photos, Sassen explores her sexuality, staging herself in poses that are both sensual and comical. She thus liberates herself from the still-predominant codes of the male gaze, in which women are displayed as an erotic object. ‘I wanted to regain power over my own body. With a man behind the camera, a sort of tension always develops, which is often about eroticism, but usually about power,’ says Sassen in 2017’s Loss and Longing by Robbert Ammerlaan

Photograph: Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

DNA, from the series Lexicon, 2007

The exhibition opens with introspective and intimate works produced in Kenya and South Africa in the late 00s and early 10s. Between the ages of two and five, Sassen lived in a Kenyan village where her father worked as a doctor. She describes this period as her ‘years of magical thinking’, and her mind is filled with memories of strong emotions and precise images from those early years: light, shadow, colours, people and starry skies permeate her photographic work

Milk, from the series Lexicon, 2006

MEP presents more than 200 works from 10 series, bringing together for the first time Sassen’s most emblematic series, including Umbra and Lexicon

IVY, from the series Lexicon, 2007

Lexicon is suffused with images that evoke death and grieving but also desire, fantasy and the search for connection with others, interspersing photographs of coffins, tombs and vegetation with portraits. All these images have a sense of ambiguity; the line between the ordinary and the bizarre is blurred. It is inside this tenuous boundary that Sassen creates a personal narrative that enables her to connect her subjects to her own fears and aspirations

Inhale, from the series Parasomnia, 2011

Sassen returned to Kenya with her parents as a teenager, and again in 2001 to take photographs. Back in the village where she had spent her early childhood, her memories merged with her imagination. Out of this experience she created her series Flamboya, Parasomnia and Umbra, which can be interpreted as an introspective journey

Photograph: Noelski/Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

Codex, from the series Parasomnia, 2010

Sassen used familiar stylistic tools – shadows, framing, colour, use of the body as a sculptural object – to juxtapose these different experiences

Photograph: Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

Lemogang, from the series Umbra, 2013

Sassen: ‘My life is unimaginable without Africa. The light and the dark. The colours, the people. The first time I went back there was with my parents, 10 years after we’d left. It was night. I lay in bed and heard the peacocks calling, and I cried in confusion’

Axiom B01, from the series Umbra, 2014

After the death of her father, shadows began to inhabit Sassen’s work, taking on different shapes and meanings over the years: from the search for the other to the search for oneself, to the visual games of her Axiom series

In Bloom for Dazed Magazine, 2011

Over the years, Sassen’s involvement with the fashion world intensified. Her style stands in stark contrast to traditional fashion photography. Under her gaze, bodies and clothes are transformed into sculptural matter that she combines with flamboyant colours in elaborately staged shots

Photograph: Noelski/Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

Adidas x Pharrell, 2017

Sassen: ‘In fashion, I can express my extroverted side; in my more personal work, the introverted side. Fashion is all about concealing and revealing, showing and hiding’

Photograph: Viviane Sassen and Stevenson

Untitled 024, from the series Roxane, 2017

Sassen presents a portrait of a complex woman with assertive postures and gazes, outside the usual stereotypes that range from ultra-sexualisation to depictions of young ingenues

Eudocimus Ruber, from the series Of Mud and Lotus, 2017

Sassen’s recent series combining paint, ink and collage. Mushrooms sprout on women’s bodies, hybrid beings cover the walls in a kind of anarchic dance and fragments of objects and bodies merge with strange landscapes

Luxaflex, from the series Of Mud and Lotus, 2017

Since 2017, Sassen has been combining human figures, animals and plant forms. These works are powerfully beautiful and seek to provoke an inner awakening, a new approach to our relationship with the world

Athalia’s Eye, 2022

Consequences/Cadavre Exquis is a series of collages inspired by the method of cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), a collaborative game invented by the surrealists. However, Sassen’s process differs from André Breton’s version of the game in that she creates these different large-format assemblages on her own. She randomly links body fragments with various objects (watering cans, ropes), plants or animals (lizards, birds). At once strange, amusing and horrifying, these whimsical creatures are shown in a new configuration imagined by the artist specifically for the MEP

From the series Modern Alchemy, 2022

The 2022 series Modern Alchemy is born of a collaboration between Viviane Sassen and philosopher Emanuele Coccia, resulting in a book in which the photographs resonate with the text. Our gaze is challenged by the juxtaposition of these disparate elements. Unlike previous series, in which human, animal and plant figures are identifiable, here they have merged, bamboozling the eye