Inez & Vinoodh Turn a Career Into a “Futurespective” in The Hague
At Kunstmuseum Den Haag, the first retrospective devoted to Inez & Vinoodh does more than look back. “Can Love Be a Photograph” presents 150 works by Inez Van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin as a kind of forward-facing survey, one that treats their long collaboration as both archive and proposition.
The exhibition traces a partnership that began in 1986 and moved across fashion photography, portraiture, and fine art with unusual consistency. Rather than organizing the show around celebrity, the duo selected six works they felt best encapsulated their practice, and none of them is a celebrity portrait. That choice gives the exhibition a quieter center of gravity: the emphasis falls on method, image-making, and the evolving relationship between intimacy and spectacle.
One of the early anchors is “Thank You Thighmaster – Joan” (1993), an experiment in digital manipulation made with Quantel Paintbox. The work reflects the duo’s early interest in altering the photographic image at a moment when such interventions still felt technically novel and conceptually charged. Another key work, “For Your Pleasure,” was the first series of photographs The Face ever bought rather than commissioned, a small but telling marker of how their images crossed from editorial assignment into the art market.
The show also includes “ME 01,” which appeared in a Balenciaga campaign and featured Russian model Chloe Pechekhonova. Across these works, Inez & Vinoodh return to portraiture as something less fixed than likeness: a site where fashion, desire, and authorship remain in motion.
Personal history is never far from the frame. The duo shared their first kiss at Paris Fashion Week in 1992, and that memory echoes through the exhibition’s more intimate works. Their ongoing “Kissing” series, which includes “Me Kissing Vinoodh (Passionately)” (1999), appears alongside newer images that continue to test how love can be pictured without becoming sentimental.
“Can Love Be a Photograph” is on view at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Stadhouderslaan 41, The Hague, through September 6, 2026. In the end, the exhibition suggests that Inez & Vinoodh’s most durable subject is not fashion, or even portraiture, but the unstable space where image, memory, and feeling meet.
