Vanessa Beecroft presents VB 53 from 7:00 to 10:00 p.m. (by invitation) VB 53 (2004) VB 53 is a performance that presents 30 models planted in soil within the Tepidarium of the Giardino dell’Orticoltura of Florence that was designed by Giacomo Roster at the end of the nineteenth century. Vanessa Beecroft Vanessa Beecroft was born in Genoa in 1969. She attended the Accademia di Belle Arti in Milan and after completing her studies she moved to New York where she lives and works. The event that thrust her into the international limelight was the “Aperto” section of the Biennale di Venezia in 1995. Vanessa Beecroft works on female obsessions: body, beauty and identity. In her first exhibition (Milan 1993) the artist presented her food diary Despair in which she catalogued the foods she had eaten over the past eight years and grouped them by color. Through her perfect, glossy performances (which for the artist are conceptually closer to painting than the act of performing) that are titled with her initials and progressively numbered, she elaborates on all the cultural and image stereotypes that have violently forced the female identity in recent years. VB presents professional models, family members and friends with the help of stylists, make-up artists and hairdressers. “In general I try to minimize their clothing to emphasize the anatomy. Sometimes accessories are references that help link the group with the setting in which the performance takes place. Usually, they are slightly ironic. I display the elements that coexist with contradictions (their beauty, their references to the past, their immediate existence, their vulgarity, their purity, their compactness as a group, their isolation within the group). I am not sure where my work will lead me.” Her major exhibits include: Biennale di San Paolo (2002); Palazzo Ducale Genoa, Kunsthalle Hamburg, Kunsthalle Wien (2001); Whitney Biennial New York (2000); MCA Chicago, MCA Sidney, Wacoal Art Center Tokyo (1999); Guggenheim Museum New York, Fondation Cartier Paris, Moderna Museet Stockholm (1998); Biennale di Venezia, Site Santa Fe Biennial (1997); Ludwig Museum Köln, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum Eindhoven (1996). In October 2003 Castello di Rivoli presented a large exhibit of her works. The book, Vanessa Beecroft. Performances 1993-2003, was also published at that time (Skira publishers).An exhibit of her works will open at the Kunsthalle in Bielefeld on 9 May (and will remain open through 22 August).