Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin
Pretty Much Everything - Photographs 1985-2010
25 June - 15 September 2010

Foam is proud to introduce an overview of work by the world-famous photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Inez and Vinoodh began working together in Amsterdam in 1986. Now, 25 years later, with campaigns for fashion houses such as YSL, Chanel, Balmain, Gucci, Louis Vuitton and Chloé, and with regular publications in W Magazine, Vogue and The New York Times, they rank among the most important photographers in the world today. They are a rare breed; successfully crossing the line between fashion and art, while at the same time, maintaining careers in both fields. The team has lived and worked in New York since 1995.

Foam features 300 photographs spanning 25 years of the duo's career. Art, fashion and portrait works all co-exist, sid-by-side. Disregarding any chronological order, the combinations of photos are based on personal, formal, social, political and intuitive associations that show the way the artists have lived with the images for 25 years.

Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin launched their international career with ten pages in the British magazine The Face in 1994. It was here that for the first time in a fashion series, the models and the backgrounds were photographed separately and subsequently combined into a single image using a computer. The series typified van Lamsweerde and Matadin's hyper-realistic style and was made to celebrate and subvert fashion within the context of a magazine.

Doubt underlies practically every image they make. Their work is ambiguous in every sense of the word and balances deliberately on the thin line between fashion and art, perverting both worlds, mirroring the strangeness of everyday life through an extreme enlargement of a singular part.

Since each photograph demands its own dimensions, and some have been shown over the years and have their own existing size and frame style, the exhibition will have a dynamic flow and will read like a huge stream of images - forming one smooth, pulsating sentence rather than divisions that are grouped by size or subject. This unique approach will draw the viewer into Inez and Vinoodh's world of constant dualism, duality and ambiguity, as well as their obsession with giving meaning to the surface, while oscillating between horror and beauty, the grotesque and the quiet, the spiritual and the banal.

Especially for the exhibition Pretty Much Everything, a newspaper was published: Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin 'Pretty Much Everything' 1985-2010: 25 photographs + 25 posters with M/M (Paris) / € 7.95. A number of posters are for sale in the Foam bookshop and online.

This exhibition was made possible thanks to Audi and Delta Lloyd.