Monica Menez, this talented German photographer, director and art director transcends the world of fashion, masterfully combining the beautiful, the glamorous, the absurd and the bizarre.
Monica Menez’s body of work is a feast of vintage aesthetics, absurdity, humour and fetishistic eroticism. Her stagings are little visual stories, sometimes split into episodes, that exploit metaphors, play on the pettiness of everyday life, have fun with surrealist elements and present fashion and art in a multifaceted way. Her photographic and filmic work plunges us into a world full of glamour and sex appeal, where everything goes wrong in a split second. No wonder the Stuttgart-based German artist has been racking up awards for the past decade. She has twice won the ASVOFF (A Shaded View on Fashion Film) award for best art direction, including one for “The Journey”, another at the Berlin Fashion Film Festival for “Odditory”, the Madrid Fashion Award for “Hors d’œuvre”, and several more at the Miami Fashion Film Festival for “The Journey”. The short films “Business as Usual and Precious”, in collaboration with the eyewear brand Willems Eyewear, are among his best little gems of humour.
IMPERTINENCE AND SENSUALITY
Monica Menez draws her insatiable inspiration from music, the photography of Guy Bourdin and Helmut Newton, and the cinema of John Waters and Jacques Tati. But above all, she wants to continue surprising her public. In just a few years, the German artist has made a name for herself as a leading director in fashion cinema with her zany, personal and original vision. It’s true that she literally sweeps us off our feet in her vintage and haute couture universe, for modern, sexy and offbeat stories in pastel colours. Her work, in which still and moving images are in constant dialogue, remains distinct from the same overall project. This year, she presented “Dressed to Compute” at Uno Art Space in Stuttgart. Through this exhibition, she continues to develop her working methods, experimenting with complex computational processes, pixels and programs, as well as artificial intelligence and enhanced reality. From this digital approach, she instils all her surreal, funny and sensual salt.
Nathalie Dassa