Contemporary Italian artist Vanessa Beecroft has won international notoriety and acclaim for her nude 'tableaux vivants' but a new exhibit in Bergamo explores a lesser-known, more traditional side to her work.
Over 400 drawings and paintings are on display in the Gallery of Modern and Contemporary art, starting from Beecroft's early work in the 1990s.
The exhibition explores the pictorial and figurative roots of her work, showing how this formed the basis of her photography and of the performance art she is renowned for: one-off tableaux vivants featuring dozens of real women.
Over the years, Beecroft has used friends, people from the street and models to pose in her performance art, dressing them in her own clothes, those of top fashion designers and sometimes just high heels or nylon tights.
While the Bergamo exhibit breaks with Beecroft's usual medium, it stays true to her preferred themes, offering a provocative consideration of sexuality, femininity, food and contemporary obsessions with appearance and beauty.
The show occupies four rooms on the second floor of the museum, with around 350 drawings and 30 medium-sized oil portraits.
It also features over 20 large canvases, including two from the early 1990s and 14 created specially for the exhibition.
Like her photographs and performances, Beecroft's paintings also demonstrate their roots in earlier Italian art.
Over the years, her work has drawn comparisons with the metaphysical atmosphere of Giorgio De Chirico and the lustre of Renaissance masters like Piero della Francesca and Sandro Botticelli.
Critics have also seen links to the British Pre-Raphaelites and modern European cinema, particularly the sometimes voyeuristic tone of work by directors Rainer Fassbinder and Jean-Luc Godard.
Beecroft was born in Genoa in 1969 of a British father and an Italian mother. She spent the first few years of her life in London before moving back to Italy.
She attended the Brera Academy in Milan, where her first exhibit in 1993 focused on her obsession with food, the female form and eating disorders.
Beecroft has lived in US for a number of years, where her work has attracted the attention of celebrities such as actor Leonardo Di Caprio, and brought her work with fashion designers such as Miuccia Prada, Helmut Lang, Dolce & Gabbana and Manolo Blahnik.
While some critics have dismissed her art as vapid and titillating - a literal representation of the Emperor's New Clothes - others see it as a feminist dissection of women's condition in modern society.
Although she rarely appears in her pieces, Beecroft has described her tableaux vivants as self portraits, explorations of the many different sides to herself that she loves and loathes.
Her shows, which are photographed and turned into collector's DVDs, have been staged in top art institutes around the world, including London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Berlin and Sao Paolo.
The Bergamo exhibition runs until July 29.
