Madeleine Berkhemer

Madeleine Berkhemer was born in 1973, she lives and works in Rotterdam (NL)

The Dutch artist Madeleine Berkhemer began her career in fashion before turning to the visual arts. She studied fashion design at the Rotterdam Academy of Visual Arts and then spent five years as an assistant to Belgian couturier Martin Margiela. She retains traces of this background in her preference for materials such as tights, Lycra, and jewelry. She creates sculptures, performances, photographs, and collages that all share a common theme: the female body and its conditions of existence in a society built by and for the male gaze.

In her collages, the artist deconstructs the body, fragments it, and reassembles it to create new forms. In her performances, she stages herself to embody a heteronormative idea of the female gender. She takes on the traits of Milly, Molly, and Mandy, her alter egos, to turn the supposed weaknesses of the female gender into strengths, exaggerating the poses, outfits, and artifices of the sexy femme fatale.

Her entire body of work plays with the aesthetic and social boundaries between eroticism and voyeurism, and between desire and disgust, in order to ensnare the viewer in their own fantasies.

- Text by Marine Hébert, April 2023