Vivian Sassen was born in Amsterdam in 1972, for more than twenty years she has explored with her work different fields in fashion, portraiture, visual arts, building her own personal visual code.
Pervaded by mysterious atmospheres, Viviane Sassen's photographs are often marked by long shadows, silhouettes and stark contrasts. Poised between reality and fiction, they seem to suggest alienating, impenetrable dimensions that arise from everyday life.
Some works reveal a reference to the unconscious and recall surrealism, with references to disorder and disorientation: as in the anomalous positions of the models which often recall dance or performance.
Viviane Sassen studied Fashion Design in Utrecht (at the HKU) and photography at the Dutch Art Institute of Atelier Arnhem, but many of her surreal colors come from Africa, where she lived for three years as a child, following her doctor father.
"My memories from Kenya were very visual", says Viviane "I was a sensitive child with an intense imagination and I captured everything that was happening around me".
Over the years many of his most enigmatic images have detached themselves from the physical place in which they were made and rather travel on the border between wakefulness and dream.
Present in 2013 at the 55th Venice Biennale curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Viviane Sassen has won numerous prizes and awards including the Infinity Award of the ICP in New York in 2011 and the Dutch national prize Prix de Rome in 2007. For the exhibition Umbra was nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize in 2015.
Sassen has embarked on an international career in fashion photography, but belongs to a generation of artist-photographers who do not make a clear distinction between personal research or commercial and editorial work. For her, photography is almost always personal.
His images have been featured in magazines such as Purple, i-D, Dazed and Confused, Vogue and The New York Times Magazine, and in many advertising campaigns for Adidas, Stella McCartney, Miu Miu, Missoni, Bottega Veneta and Louis Vuitton.
In 2009 he exhibited at the Forma space in Milan and in 2008 at the FOAM Museum in Amsterdam.
In 2012 a major retrospective of his work took place at the Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, at the Rencontres d'Arles Festival, at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh, at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia, USA; at the Fotografie Forum in Frankfurt, at the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland. With his work "Umbra" is this year
present at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and at the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.
Important group exhibitions in 2011 were “New Photography” at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; “No Fashion, Please!” at the Vienna Kunsthalle; and “Figure and Ground” at the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art in Toronto as part of the Contact Photography Festival.
