Vanessa Beecroft Vb Lv

Paris's Louis Vuitton store and 4306-square-foot exhibition space on the Champs Elysees just underwent a high-profile 20-month renovation to reopen bigger, brighter and full of art at the end of 2006. Vanessa Beecroft marked the date with a performance in which, as Artforum described it, "30 naked models--black and white--sat silently on shelves alongside classic Louis Vuitton handbags and luggage." Charta's VB LV documents Beecroft's monumental inaugural performance in this one-foot-square, glossy hardcover album. According to New York's Deitch Gallery, "Vanessa Beecroft works in the gap between art and life. The work is neither performance nor documentary, but something in between. Her live events are recorded through photography and film, but her conceptual approach is actually closer to painting. Beecroft is making contemporary versions of the complex figurative compositions that have challenged painters from the Renaissance onwards. She sets up a structure for the participants in her live events to create their own composition, presenting themselves according to their own internalized aesthetic system." Beecroft was born in 1969 in Genoa, Italy. She currently lives between New York and Los Angeles.