Hellen van Meene - The Photographers' Gallery 1999

Published on the occasion of the artist's exhibition curated by Kate Bush at The Photographers' Gallery, London, 1999.

The young women in Hellen van Meene's extraordinary colour portraits are friends and acquaintances, people she has grown up with or encountered in her home town of Alkmaar in Holland. Children, pre-pubescents, teenagers and twenty-somethings: van Meene's subjects range in age.
Though clearly contemporary portraits, many also conjure historical female archetypes, which accounts for their sometimes anachronistic, sometimes timeless, feel. A chubby girl in a bathtub, eyes downcast, lost in thought in a summer garden, could be Shakespeare's Ophelia by way of the pre-Raphaelite painter, Millais. A teenager adopts a contra posto pose for the camera, her raven tresses covering her nakedness like a young Godiva. A beatific, cropped-haired brunette in an orange flowered dress has the poise of a modern-day Jeanne d'Arc. Echoes of historical portraiture reverberate through the images - from Piero della Francesca to Breughel, from Dante Gabriel Rossetti to Vermeer - remaining skillfully implicit, rather than explicit.