Viviane Sassen considers fine art, fashion photography and fragility in Italy

Viviane Sassen’s This Body Made of Stardust at Collezione Maramotti is a hypnotic exploration of transformation, impermanence, and the mystery of existence. Curated by Sassen herself, the exhibition spans over two decades of her photographic practice, weaving together more than fifty works—alongside newly commissioned pieces—into a meditation on mortality, identity, and emotional rebirth. Set within Collezione Maramotti, a private contemporary art space housed in the former Max Mara factory in Reggio Emilia and filled with the fashion company’s art holdings, the show fits well in a collection that champions to experimental and visionary art.

Known for a genre-defying practice that fuses fine art and fashion photography and expands the boundaries of the photographic medium, Sassen creates an atmosphere at once intimate and otherworldly. Referring to herself as a sculptor, she distills her creative impulse simply: “My first language is images,” she tells Wallpaper*. Though she values visuals over words, the exhibition’s evocative title nods toward the cosmic and the poetic—life as something transient, luminous, and inevitably decaying.

Several works in the exhibition showcase Sassen’s technique of intervening directly onto the photographic surface—either by painting over the printed image to create a unique piece, or by scanning her mark-making and incorporating it into the final print. In Polyporus Badius (2017), she layers pigment over a photograph of a torso entwined with fungal growth, blurring the line between body and nature. Her brushstrokes heighten the sense of organic fusion, making it feel as if the human form itself is mutating. In Chronos (2019), Sassen captures the groin of a classical marble statue, its male organ broken off. Over the photograph, she intervenes with a vivid red ink stain, bleeding across the surface like a wound or a raw echo of what is missing. The painted gesture disrupts the cool permanence of the marble, injecting a flash of vulnerability into the image. In works from her Cadavre Exquis series, several of which are presented here, Sassen transforms photographs into sculptural collages by cutting, folding, and layering fragments of bodies, landscapes, and textures. These hybrid forms disrupt the coherence of the human figure, blurring the line between two and three dimensions.

Sassen’s preoccupation with mortality and the body’s fragility can be traced back to her early years spent in Kenya, where her father worked as a doctor. Confronted with illness and death from a young age, she developed an acute awareness of life’s impermanence—a sensibility that permeates her work with both tenderness and pain. This awareness, she tells Wallpaper*, was further sharpened by personal tragedy: her father later took his own life, an event that cast a long emotional shadow over her understanding of loss, absence, and the delicate thresholds between life and death.

Unbound by chronology or theme, the exhibition unfolds in a loose, intuitive rhythm, privileging emotional resonance over linear narrative. In visceral dialogue with sculptures from the Collezione Maramotti—by Evgeny Antufiev, Kaarina Kaikkonen, Fabrizio Prevedello, and TARWUK—Sassen’s images slip free from temporal constraints. She recalls feeling “like a kid in a candy store” when selecting works from the collection, instinctively gravitating toward pieces that mirror her ongoing preoccupations with presence, absence, and transformation. Reflecting on Prevedello’s minimalist slate and reinforced concrete sculpture Cornerstone (2019), she remarked that it reminded her of a guillotine.

At its core, This Body Made of Stardust is less a retrospective than an emotional archive—an excavation of psyche, memory, and the dissolution of self. Fittingly, Sassen inserts herself into her work only as a shadow: in Lucius (2010) and Bird (2005), her silhouette, camera in hand, is cast onto the figures of a child and a young adult, respectively. These ghostly overlays become quiet acts of self-portraiture, blurring the line between observer and observed, innocence and self-awareness, and meditating on the very nature of photography itself.

Viviane Sassen’s This Body Made of Stardust is at Collezione Maramotti until July 27 2025

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