Edited by Chris Kraus. Conversation with Vanessa Beecroft, Chris Kraus, Miltos Manetas, Jeffrey Deitch, Donatien Grau, Hamza Walker, Stacey McKenzie, Vanessa Place.
In extensive interviews with collaborators and artists, Beecroft discusses the motivations behind (and audience reactions to) her provocative performances
Hbk, 9.25 x 12 in. / 638 pgs / 665 color / 20 bw. | 3/10/2026 | Awaiting stock $85.00
Published by Walther König, Köln. Edited by Chris Kraus. Conversation with Vanessa Beecroft, Chris Kraus, Miltos Manetas, Jeffrey Deitch, Donatien Grau, Hamza Walker, Stacey McKenzie, Vanessa Place.
Performance artist Vanessa Beecroft (born 1969) is best known for her large-scale, regimentally choreographed performances and tableaux vivants involving naked or nearly naked women. In the 2010s she was a frequent collaborator with Kanye West, serving as creative lead for his "Runaway" music video and designing the first four presentations of his Yeezy collection. In Jane Bleibt Jane, Beecroft reflects on her career thus far through six in-depth conversations. Originating from a 2015 conversation between Christian Krachet and Walther Konig about the artist's work, the publisher then invited her to reflect upon her own performances. The title refers to a conversation with model Stacey McKenzie that Beecroft recorded in 2022 in collaboration with Chris Kraus—and to a film admired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, though no one involved has seen it.
Published by Charta/Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery. Edited by Maria Luisa Frisa. Essay by Francesco Bonami.
VB 53 provides documentation of Vanessa Beecroft's most recent performance at Pitti Immagine Uomo 66 in Florence's Horticultural Garden. 21 models of varying appearance and race were planted in a mass of earth in the tepidarium. All were nude except for a single accessory: Helmut Lang shoes that wrapped around their ankles, separating their bare legs from the bare, rough earth. According to Beecroft, “The sole is reference to land art. Very dark and humid, like the rich foam of cultivated fields... The performance juxtaposes the purity of the female body, their nudity, with the dirty color of the soil and its material. Some models look like lillies, others like potatoes. Lilies and potatoes can also grow in filth.” The 50 images in this book illuminate Beecroft's signature issues: the body, beauty and identity.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Essay by Thomas Kellein.
Vanessa Beecroft's performances have been described as art, fashion, brilliant, terrible, evocative, provocative, disturbing, sexist and empowering. The primary material in her work is the live female figure, which remains ephemeral and separate. These women, mainly unclothed, similar, unified through details like hair color, or identical shoes, stand motionless, unapproachable and regimented in the space while viewers watch them. Neither performance nor documentary, Beecroft's live events are recorded through photography and film, but her conceptual approach is actually closer to painting: she makes contemporary versions of the complex figurative compositions that have challenged painters from the Renaissance onwards. Beecroft's more recent work has a slightly more theatrical approach--the uniforms are period clothing, not nudity, and some of her performances include food, while others have featured men in military attire. The artist's provocative tabeaux are accompanied here by the drawings and backstage Polaroids she uses in planning her often-disturbing performances. Includes an extensive interview with Beecroft, which touches on topics informing her work, including men, anorexia, exercise, family, film and beauty.
Vanessa Beecroft: VB53
Vanessa Beecroft: Photographs, Films, Drawings