IRIS VAN DONGEN

Iris Van Dongen is a Dutch artist living in Berlin who has exhibited her huge pastel drawings of pretty young girls all across Europe and North America. Iris’s work is largely based on fashion shoots, and it’s so damn pretty and dark and romantic that it makes us depressed to look at real fashion shoots, which are often ugly and bright and slutty.

Vice: Hi Iris, I’ll just start with what I want to know the most: Are your pictures just illustrated recreations of fashion photographs?
Iris Van Dongen: Sometimes, the initial drawings do come from shoots or collages and sometimes just straight from my imagination, it’s a mix, really. My ideas can come from memories, or contemporary things I see everyday. The best is when an image just flashes in my head and looks amazing. It’s very annoying trying to get that on paper though.

Do you set up the shoots yourself, or do you draw from existing photos you’ve found in a magazine or something?
Usually I’ll take the photographs myself. It’s important to see exactly how the human moved in the pictures. Though I often work from photos that are about 15 cm high, so I suppose I can’t actually see that much, and some of my pictures are huge, like 230 cm high. But, working that way, I end up with something that’s so much more alive than if I’d just copied some image. The objects, clothing, and backdrop in the pictures usually just drift off to the back of my head, so the flesh looks more detailed and precise than the rest of the drawing. You make a piece of art really live by not giving everything the same focus.

When you take the photos yourself, do you work on the outfits with a stylist?
No. I style it myself, I know what I want much better than any stylist.

Ha! Would you say you always use the same type of girl?
I like using models who aren’t too extravagantly turned out or conspicuous looking. In my work, it’s about the dialogue between the person and his or her surroundings, not about their expressions. I want the viewer to almost look past the person, as if she was an abstract object.

Why do you use so much pastel and charcoal?
It’s actually a terrible medium, pastel. Those things are so thick and it never sticks to the paper, so actually I tap it all on the paper with my fingers until there’s a layer that’s not too thick and not too thin. I really love the black of the charcoal, you don’t get those deep velvety finishes with paint, so I just have to deal with the pastel misery!

Your older work, the abstract black and white figures you made in the 90s, is very different from these pictures. Why did you suddenly change to this very photographic style?
I was looking for a direct way of provoking emotions. I wanted to work with something everyone knows and flirt with clichés and aesthetics. As my technique improved, my work became more and more photographic and isn’t disturbed by artistic excess anymore. It’s perfect. I think it’s very healthy to make massive changes sometimes. For example, in my current exhibition at the Diana Stigter gallery in Amsterdam, I poured marble rock into see-through polyester.

Your hooligan drawings show young and pretty girls wearing football scarves. What’s that all about?
The hooligan scarves with the skull and the little devil from Manchester United are super clichéd, and at the same time so primal and important to people. I see the impotence of humanity reflected in that scarf. Actually, I’m always looking for objects, or signs from our society, that are part of a collective memory, and then I think about what they mean to people these days. I like to show the contradiction between the magical and rational.

Where does all this deep stuff come from?
I like thinking about life, death, and passion.

PHOTOS: COURTESY OF IRIS VAN DONGEN
WORDS: NINA BYTTEBIER