The years shall run like rabbits

13/12/2013

The years shall run like rabbits, is the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by Dutch artist Hellen van Meene. Best known for her portraits of young girls in various stages of adolescence, van Meene's photographs are characterized by their exquisite use of light, formal elegance and palpable psychological tension. Recently, the artist's portaiture projects have explored the use of animals as subject, whilst retaining the signature style and formalism of previous work.

© Hellen van Meene

In The years shall run like rabbits, van Meene presents a new series of portraits, often juxtaposing girls and dogs within the same frame, shifting the loci of the compositions to the spatial and psychic relationship between subjects. Not only does the combination of dog and girl evoke well-known motifs from art history - such as Velasquez's Las Meninas or Gainsborough's Cottage Girl with Dong and Pitcher - it also plays with dialectics of familiarity and distance, protection and weakness and the boundaries between human and animal.

The title of the exhibition refers to a lyric from W.H Auden's poem, As I walked Out One Evening, an elegiac ballad lamenting the inescapable passage of time : The years shall run like rabbits / For in my arms I hold / The Flowers of the Ages / And the first love of the world. Fittingly, girls from all stages of adolescent and post-pubescent maturity are presented here, and the portraits hint at a deeper psychological weight emerging in van Meene's older subjects. Throughout the series, girls are often presented alone, seated or leaning on a single chair against an ecru toned wall. Van Meene's younger subjects often engage the camera directly, displaying all of the hopes and confusions of youth. The artist's older subjects are knowingly more guarded in their gestural vernacular, often facing the camera while eschewing its directness, a complexity of mercurial energy teeming just below the surface.

© Hellen van Meene

Born in Alkmaar, The Netherlands in 1972, Hellen van Meene lives and work in Heiloo, The Netherlands. Her work has been exhibited internationally and is held in the collections of major musuems worldwide including the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Victoria & Albert Museum, London, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, MoCA Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A retrospective of van Meene's work will be on display at the Hague Museum of Photography, Spring 2015. She is the subject of four artists monographs, including Hellen van Meene : Japan Series (The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago and De Hallen, Haarlem, the Netherlands, 2002), Hellen and Hellen van Meene : tout va disparaître (Schirmer/Mosel, 2009).

Hellen van Meene : The years shall run like rabbits 

November 8 - December 21, 2013

Yancey Richardson Gallery

525 West 22nd Street

New York, NY 10011