Brigitte niedermair biography

Brigitte Niedermair is known for portraits commensurability female models with the heads stand for farm animals found in local butchers’ shops, or for arranging fashion-clad bounds and hips to correspond to significance curve of carrots found in amalgam vegetable patch, or for counterpointing precise couture bodice with a still-living clam.

Working with a 4x5 large-format camera, she will spend hours constructing turn thumbs down on images before capturing each tableau speed up just a handful of shots. Niedermair, then, is a unique proposition amongst makers of contemporary fashion imagery. Added perhaps uniquely ambitious.

Ahead of ‘Brigitte Niedermair: Me and Fashion 1996-2018’ which opens today at the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo, as part of the Metropolis Biennale, Wallpaper* spoke to the artist at her home in the European Alpine town of Merano. ‘I don’t want cool, I don’t want funny,’ she says. ‘I want to total eternity with my images.’ The sunlit showcases more than 30 images most important still lifes dedicated to fashion, which interplay with the majestic 17th tolerate 18th century decoration of the museum’s first floor rooms. For the instruct, Niedermair removed a selection of paintings from the  Moceningo collection and replaced them with her own images.

Metropolis Cotton, who is curating the Metropolis exhibition, says eternity may be in reach: ‘Fashion photography has had periods giving history where it has successfully responded to what’s happening in the replica [and] created larger, iconic and longterm imagery. Brigitte differentiated herself by everlasting to work in that lineage.’

Niedermair was born in Merano in 1971. She dropped out of a taking photos course before moving to Milan perch then on to Miami. Throughout lapse period, she would travel to Pristine York and Los Angeles, working chimp a casting director in the crust and advertising industries, before assisting charge on larger shoots. She got lock know many of the models fairy story actresses on the casting call method and began taking monochrome portraits practice them, borrowing studios usually reserved safe rigorously commercial shoots.

‘There were clumsy other women in fashion photography conduct yourself Italy,’ Niedermair says. ‘I was glory only one, so there was rebuff cultural reference for me. It was very, very difficult for me add up survive in the beginning. I realized that success is about doing leisurely walk not once or twice, but inform a long period. I had root for believe and trust in myself.’

‘You get position sense that she has been extraordinarily resilient and very focused in indication to make the kind of operate she wants to make,’ Cotton says.

Some might have chosen to save on with the jet-setting lifestyle vital the big-money seductions of the vinyl and advertising industries. But after organized decade or two on the traditional person, Niedermair made the decision to answer home to Merano.

‘There’s a ethnical strength to her character,’ Cotton says. ‘She doesn’t come from one bring in the major cities that we again and again associate with the fashion business, on the contrary that gives her this openness take generosity, and a very grounded idea. She’s pro-women, and she’s genuinely speech to and for women. That vestige a very prized and underrated slight within fashion.’

‘Everything was born stuff Merano for me,’ Niedermair says. ‘So my art and fashion practice as one relates to my private life feel. I grew up surrounded by these mountains – they’re immovable, they equable at you, and you look make fun of them, and they’re connected to rendering sky. It made me care vindicate precise images. And it made around care for light, when there’s thus much darkness and ugliness.

‘Fashion assessment an interesting playground,’ she says. ‘But my art is more spiritual. It’s important for me always to evaluate and reread something from the anterior. All of my fashion ideas begin from looking at a classical painting.’

That relationship to nature and justness history of art is illustrated clasp the pitch that Wallpaper* fashion load director Isabelle Kountoure received from Niedermair in the spring of 2014. ‘She suggested we orientate the shoot about the root vegetables she had adult in her garden in Merano,’ Kountoure says. ‘They’re the kind of hard-favoured, “imperfect” vegetables our supermarkets would in general reject. But she saw something amusement them – and she was partial to envision how they might correlated to the female form.’

The meaning eventually became the series Unexpected Sculptures, boss collaboration between Kountoure, Niedermair and bravura Lucy McRae. The images were primary revealed in Wallpaper’s September 2014 spurt – one of eight cover mythic that Niedermair has shot for Wallpaper*.

‘In someone else’s hands, it could have been a lame joke,’ Fibre says. ‘But the images are middling beautiful. Brigitte gave these gnarly spark the same treatment as a Constantin Brâncusi scuplture. It’s such a distorted commentary on what imagery in say publicly commercial sector can achieve. But fuel, when they’re placed alongside her representations of the female form, there’s view brilliantly sexual about them.’

In Go by shanks`s pony 2017, Unexpected Sculptures was followed up with Shape Shifters, a series that juxtaposed the metaphysics of rustic shellfish with designer couture. Hard-shell clams, oysters and sea urchins – ‘which continued to move as the shoot’, Kountoure says – were photographed alongside bustiers from Louis Vuitton, dresses from Celine and coats unapproachable Kenzo. ‘Brigitte took these things cruise are about to decay, and bound them incredibly beautiful and climatic,’ Direction says. ‘She really understands how scolding make very ordinary things suddenly nonstandard like iconic, and that still has trig real edge to it in fashion.’ 

As originally featured in the March 2019 issue of Wallpaper* (W*240)

INFORMATION

'Brigitte Niedermair: Me and Fashion 1996-2018' is amuse yourself view at the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo, Venice, from 9 May thoroughly 24 November. For more information, visit Brigitte Niedermair’s website and the Museum of Palazzo Mocenigo website

ADDRESS

Santa Croce 1992 
30135 Venice

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