Brigitte Niedermair

In a second volume, Niedermair returns with a book devoted to the special creative process she employs to design her hyper-constructed images for Dior. A collection of her best production, the photographs in the book are accompanied by illustrations, collages, and sketches drawn by Niedermair herself to prepare and build her sets, thus revealing the finesse and rigor of her artistic practice for the very first time. From iconic fashion photography to Renaissance painting, from references to Dior s history to contemporary art, her sources of inspiration are endlessly rich and often surprising, and her drawings are work of art in themselves.

Informed by her parallel paths as an artist and a photographer, Brigitte Niedermair expands the conventions and biases of the fashion image system. Her work focuses on representations of women s bodies in art and culture, with deeply constructed images and striking compositions that make for a distinctive style. This volume explores the remarkable relationship between Dior and Niedermair s aesthetic, resulting in photographs radiating a strong sense of unconventional femininity. The first section is devoted to the collaboration throughout the recent years, followed by a portfolio of exclusive images of historical and iconic Christian Dior creations. Captured with an analogic, classical technique in a five-by-four-inch format which was used during photography s early beginnings 42 pieces from Dior archives are photographed twice, with each version of the image offering a unique perspective and revealing hidden details, such as the construction of the designs. With the principal essay by Olivier Gabet and contributions by Dior s creative director, Maria Grazia Chiuri, and artists and friends of Niedermair, this beautifully crafted book offers an extraordinary look into one of today s most fascinating creatives.

Brigitte Niedermair’s solo exhibition at the Museo di Palazzo Mocenigo is a dynamic interplay of the artist’s photographs - drawn from her archive of over twenty years of photographic practice - with the architecture and décor of the interconnected rooms of Palazzo Mocenigo. Working with international photography curator Charlotte Cotton, Niedermair has responded to the distinct atmosphere of each room, and inserted her hallmark tableaux fashion and still life photographs into these historic environments that range from intimate to imposing scale. The synergy between the public and once-private interiors of this historic Mocenigo family palazzo - Venice’s museum of fabrics and costume since 1985 - and Niedermair’s photographs is multilayered, with a tenor that shifts from room to room. Niedermair selected paintings from the Palazzo Mocenigo collection for de-installation, replacing them with her photographs to consciously amplify and counterargue with the embedded subtexts of gender and identity that permeate these predominantly 17th century interiors. With images that are surreal yet lyrical, artist Brigitte Niedermair explores the antagonism between photography and painting. Her work touches boundaries that are yet to be defined, exposing the ambiguity between seeing and imagining, fiction and truth. The book includes some of the most acclaimed phortographs by Niedermair like the T-shirts emblazoned with the feminist slogan ‘We should all be feminists’ and the provocative The Last Supper, one of the best examples of how art can invert meanings and invent languages. Brigitte Niedermair has revisited The Last Supper from a female perspective, conveys the central role of women in everyday life.