Camille Vivier at MEP

MEP presents the first retrospective exhibition dedicated to French artist Camille Vivier, a prominent figure in contemporary photography.

Overview

Through a selection of works where bodies, sculptural forms, and uncanny presences converse, a universe where both sensual and enigmatic unfolds, shaped by multiple references and unexpected visual echoes. Camille Vivier’s female figures fascinate as much as they unsettle, asserting the full power and complexity of their identities.

For over twenty-five years, Camille Vivier (b. 1977, France) has developed a practice at the intersection of fine art photography and fashion photography. Her work, centred on the body and still life, engages in a dialogue with commissions produced for major magazines. From these two facets emerges a singular visual language, where sensuality, mystery, and poetry intertwine to interrogate the relationship between the animate and the inanimate.

At the heart of her practice, female representation—and more specifically the nude—unfolds through numerous cultural references. Fascinated by figures of powerful women from the fine arts, pop culture, and underground scenes, she also draws inspiration from literature, comics, and early Hollywood icons. Her models assert their presence powerfully. The unconventional bodies of female bodybuilders—Sophie, Tjiki, Deborah—constitute a privileged field of exploration. Through them, the artist engages in a reflection on the plurality of femininities, where the construction of the body and of identity resonates with the practice of sculpture.

In enigmatic stagings, these figures converse with anthropomorphic objects chosen for their aesthetics as much as for their symbolic significance: monumental sculptures in the public space, votive candles, modernist puppets, or the biomechanical sets designed by H.R. Giger for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979). Photography becomes the site of unexpected encounters, where a sometimes unsettling tension arises between human bodies and sculpted forms, between matter and flesh, between what breathes and what merely retains its shape.

Curated by Victoria Arescheva, the exhibition retraces Camille Vivier’s entire artistic career through a thematic journey bringing together around ten series and nearly a hundred works: gelatin silver and digital prints, Polaroids, as well as works conceived specifically for the exhibition, some of which play with scale and presentation methods.

About The Artist

Camille Vivier (b. 1977, France) is a French photographer who lives and works in Paris. After studying at the École supérieure d’art de Grenoble and then at Central Saint Martins in London, she began her career as an assistant at Purple magazine in the late 1990s—an experience that opened doors to the fashion world while allowing her to develop her personal artistic practice in parallel. Her editorial work has appeared in numerous publications, including i-D, Dazed & Confused, AnOther Magazine, and The New Yorker; she has also executed commissions for houses such as Stella McCartney, Martin Margiela, Cartier, Eres, Kenzo, Dior, and Hermès. Her work has been the subject of several monographic publications and numerous solo exhibitions in France and abroad, as well as group exhibitions at various institutions, including the Frac MECA in Bordeaux, the Fondation d’entreprise Ricard in Paris, and the Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.