Vanessa Beecroft
b. 1969
Vanessa Beecroft experienced a meteoric rise to fame in the art world. She was twenty-four when she had her first exhibition and, only five years later, her work was on display in New York's renowned Guggenheim Museum. Photographs of her performances fetch large sums of money at art fairs and auctions; on 30 June 2000, Sotheby's in London sold one of her photographs for more than $30,000! Beecroft's medium' is usually young women, who appear in her performances either scantily clad or naked. I regard them as subjects of a painting,' says the artist. There is a design of the performance before it happens, made by colors and numbers... The girls always change it during the four to five hours' time they are installed. I get disappointed, but it is the gap between what I'm expecting and what happens that I'm interested in.' The daughter of an Englishman and an Italian professor of literature, Beecroft spent the first four years of her life in London. When her parents separated, she went to live with her mother near Lake Garda in northern Italy. She later studied classical art, architecture and stage design in Genoa and Milan. For her first exhibition in Milan's Galerie Inga Pinn, in…
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