C O R P U S D E I S A B R I N A VA N D E N H E U V E L
T H E D I V I N E B O D Y
D I V I N E F L O R E N C E in the footsteps of the old masters
With its profusion of history and impressive works of art, what does the Florence of today do with the mind of a creative soul? How does the magic of this iconic city translate into the work of a young photographer in the year 2017? I met Sabrina van den Heuvel in the autumn of 2017 in Florence, where we were both seeking inspiration from the Italian masters of the Cinquecento. Sabrina was an artist in residence at the NIKI art-historical institute, and I was fulfilling a long-cherished dream to learn the traditional Florentine way of painting at the esteemed Florence Academy of Art, before I started my new position as Managing Director of Sotheby’s Amsterdam. At the academy, I learnt how Italian Renaissance painters, such as Michelangelo and Leonardo Da Vinci, learnt to paint. Mixing the paints, preparing the canvas and painting layer upon layer to create a portrait or still life was an unforgettable experience. The rich decor of the captivating city of Florence was a fantastic source of inspiration. Edwin Becker recommended I get in touch with Sabrina, a talented young photographer who was also embarking on an artistic adventure in Florence. Several days after I arrived, on a rainy Sunday morning, I travelled from the beautiful villa where I was staying in the picturesque hills of Fiesole to a hill on the other side of the city, home to the NIKI, and at the time, to Sabrina. My previous visit to the NIKI was more than 20 years ago, during my art history degree. The institute, located on the Viale Torricelli, had not changed at all over the years. Sabrina was there to open the gate, dressed from head to toe in black and, despite the rain, sporting a huge pair of pink sunglasses (a permanent feature of hers, I found out later). Sabrina warmly welcomed me; she was very enthusiastic and could not wait to tell me all about her project. I was instantly curious to see Sabrina’s work and keen to find out how the city influenced her. Sabrina
had a clear idea of the photographs she wanted to take, and was busy preparing a shoot that was planned for later in the week. Using piles of pencil sketches, poems by Michelangelo, her own poems and pictures from books she had found in the library, Sabrina acquainted me with her thoughts. She had made extensive preparations and had been working well into the night. Sabrina was captivated by the city as well as by masters such as Michelangelo and Caravaggio. Or was she in fact captivated by the mysterious, sensual Florentine man Jacopo, whom she had met the day before, and became the inspiration for her series Corpus Dei? We met on multiple occasions during our time in Florence. Despite working on entirely different projects, we shared a creative flow; we both had an enormous sense of freedom and had plenty to discuss. It was Urban Larsson, the Dutch-Swedish painter, who had advised me to travel to Florence and, together with Sabrina – who had also been in touch with Urban before – I joined the inspirational lecture evenings at the Studio of his good friend Charles H. Cecil in Borgo San Frediano. Sabrina was not only fascinated by the images that Charles discussed, but possibly even more interested in the young male painters standing at the back of the room, who would have made for excellent models for Sabrina’s shoot. During our meetings, I was able to closely follow how Sabrina set to work. For me, the highlights were the day of the shoot and Sabrina’s delight at having created exactly what she had envisaged. Jacopo was the elixir that ultimately allowed Sabrina to give life to her enchanting blackand-white photographs. His raw personality lends the photographs the characteristic profundity that Sabrina sought.
T H E D I V I N E B O D Y
T H E D I V I N E B O D Y
As an ambitious photographer, Sabrina van den Heuvel aspires to develop as rapidly as possible, ideally on the international stage. Her drive to convince the viewer of both the beauty and rawness of her themes stems from her craving for profundity. And while Sabrina’s ultimate approach is also governed by spontaneity and the sequence of cinematic fragments, her preparations are to the contrary: well thought- and tried-out, and punctuated by an enormous range of studies and drawings. With a steady hand, she uses simple pencil lines to accurately indicate the contours and positions of the models. Many drawings reveal more than poses, with Sabrina capturing expression in the faces and positions, reminiscent of the intense drawings of the artist Egon Schiele. This gifted Viennese draughtsman combined his talent for composition and lines with a fascination with pain and despair. Long prior to the conception of her series, Sabrina sought inspiration in sources ranging from sculpture to poetry, delving into the spirit of the age and reading countless books on the subject. She saturated herself in literature and (art) history, using every ounce of background information to help conceptualise the successive scenes. Sabrina’s historical heroes include Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine, French authors who had a stormy, tumultuous relationship, and Vaslav Nijinsky, the Polish-Russian ballet dancer who also daringly
d evised revolutionary choreographies. This reverence is an indication of Sabrina’s affinity with the period around the turn of the 20th century, when many creative souls leapt into the new age. At the time, a great number of authors and artists were fascinated by the fringes of society and the seamy side of the established art world. In the case of Rimbaud and Verlaine, we also see a constant love struggle, a tussle with life and the desire to get the most out of this temporal existence. These are typical character istics of the fin de siècle, a period to which Sabrina is strongly drawn. It will then perhaps come as no surprise that Sabrina also turned her attention to Vincent van Gogh, the definitive tormented creative soul, in her personal interpretation of the artist in Van Gogh Black&White 1.
1 Sabrina van den Heuvel,
Van Gogh Black&White, 2017
I
II
III
IV
V
VI