Bettina Rheims: “SACRE-COEUR, 2009”, Silver Bromide Gelatin Print, edition of 5, signed, numbered, size: 105 x 81,5 cm. Price upon request.

About this artwork

According to the alter ego of Marcel Duchamp, who called it Rose Sélavy (c’est la vie), Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly made “Rose, c’est Paris”. And so they tell their story of Rose, who is looking for her missing sister-in-law and has to experience bizarre things. Bettina Rheims added: “C’est Paris” sounds like “séparé”, meaning “separé”, like separated, voilà. The whole project is a fantasy, a surrealistic journey, where strange places can be seen, which nobody knows but some well-known monuments but from a different angle”.

BOOK OFFER: Collector’s Edition of 1,500 copies, each numbered and signed by Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly. Hardcover book, 29 x 40.5 cm, 332 pages, with booklet, DVD, and souvenirs in retro attaché case. US$ 1.250. Order here.

An erotically tinged elegy to Paris, Bettina Rheims and Serge Bramly’s multimedia detective story spans art, fashion, sex, celebrity, and history. Fetishistically boxed up in a retro attaché case, this noir tale of mystery and magic includes a feature length film, an accompanying booklet, gathered objects (or are they evidence?), and the exquisite photo volume itself.

  • Bettina Rheims does not take photographs; she constructs compositions, like a painter.”

    — Le Monde, Paris

About Bettina Rheims

Since the early 1980s, Bettina Rheims (* 1952, Neuilly-sur-Seine) has been the most sought-after French photographer. From her very beginnings, the female body has been the central focus of her work. Her unusual and provocatvie portrais and nude images each reveal a hidden part of the subject. Spanning commercial work and artistic series, the work of Bettina Rheims impresses with each photo, as much for the vigor of each image as for the thrilling variety of Rheims’s subjects and aesthetics. With equal attention to anonymous subjects cast in the street as to such global beauty stars as Kate Moss, Madonna, Monica Bellucci, Claudia Schiffer, and Naomi Campbell, her artwork showcases Rheims’s particular interest in female fragility and strength, and of the magic encounter between model and artist which disrupts codes of so-called eroticism to build up a new image system for womanhood.

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