Brigitte Niedermair: Me and Fashion

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.