The body as a symbol, the shadow as matter
Featuring over fifty photographs and a video work, the exhibition on display until July 27, 2025 at Collezione Maramotti, represents the largest Italian retrospective dedicated to the Dutch artist, who personally oversees the installation.
Through works created between 2005 and 2025 – some specifically conceived for the occasion – Viviane Sassen constructs a visual constellation that speaks of life and death, transformation, desire, and memory.
At the heart of the exhibition, the human body fragments and multiplies: abstracted, recomposed, dismembered, it merges with organic matter, earth, water, vegetation, becoming a symbol, a trace, a threshold. The memento mori – a classical iconography of transience – is inverted into a memento amoris, an invitation to marvel at the crossing, where the end coincides with transformation.
The artist sculpts light but above all shadow, which becomes a metaphor for everything that eludes us: fears, fantasies, desires. An aesthetic suspended between surrealism and erotic impulse, between fashion (an area in which she has worked extensively) and sculpture, a discipline that the artist feels is an integral part of her research.
