HELLEN VAN MEENE
2013-12-18Best known for her portraits of young girls in various stages of adolescence, van Meeneʼs photographs are characterized by their exquisite use of light, formal elegance and palpable psychological tension. Recently, the artistʼs portraiture projects have explored the use of animals as subject, whilst retaining the signature style and formalism of previous work.
In The years shall run like rabbits, van Meene presents a new series of portraits, often juxtaposing girls and dogs within the same frame, shifting the loci of the compositions to the spatial and psychic relationship between subjects. Not only does the combination of dog and girl evoke well-known motifs from art history, such as Velasquezʼs Las Meninas or Gainsboroughʼs Cottage Girl with Dog and Pitcher, it also plays with the dialectics of familiarity and distance, protection and weakness and the boundaries between human and animal.
The title of the exhibition refers to a lyric from W.H. Audenʼs poem, As I Walked Out One Evening, an elegiac ballad lamenting the inescapable passage of time: The years shall run like rabbits / For in my arms I hold / The Flower of the Ages, / And the first love of the world. Fittingly, girls from all stages of adolescent and post-pubescent maturity are represented here, and the portraits hint at a deeper psychological weight emerging in van Meeneʼs older subjects. Throughout the series, girls are often presented alone, seated or leaning on a single chair against an ecru toned wall. Van Meeneʼs younger subjects often engage the camera directly, displaying all of the hopes and confusions of youth. The artistʼs older subjects are knowingly more guarded in their gestural vernacular, often facing the camera while eschewing its directness, a complexity of mercurial energy teeming just below the surface.
Exhibition runs through to December 21st, 2013
Yancey Richardson Gallery
525 West 22nd Street
New York
NY
10011
