• Vanessa Beecroft
• VBSS.006.MP , 2006
• Digital c-print 76x59 cm
• Edition of 10

The works of Vanessa Beecroft combine beauty and suffering, the aesthetic rendering of reality and an obsession with perfection. As the art critic Roberta Smith writes, the works of Vanessa Beecroft put us in front of an idea of beauty that becomes reality: “real time, real space, real flesh”. It’s the conflict between trying to achieve an ideal, the illusion of an order, at least as a point of reference, and its ineluctable fall. But the work with the black women has different references.

In 2005, Beecroft followed a strong impulse to go to the Sudan, after reading in the New York Times that there was a genocide, and connecting with it. She took a cameraman and a photographer with her on a trip to a Catholic mission in southern Sudan. She began documenting southern Sudan (not Darfur) and continued until 2007 as recently taken a turn to imagery based on travels in the southern Sudan. The series includes classically-composed photographs of a Sudanese Christ and enthroned Madonnas, as well as a self-portrait as a Madonna nursing orphaned African infants