L'exposition « Camille Vivier » à la MEP

From 10 June to 13 September 2026, the MEP presents the first retrospective dedicated to French artist Camille Vivier, a leading figure in contemporary photography. Through a collection of works where bodies, sculptural forms, and unsettling presences dialogue, a universe that is both sensual and enigmatic unfolds, traversed by multiple references and unexpected visual echoes. Camille Vivier's female figures fascinate as much as they destabilise, asserting the full power and complexity of their identities.

For over twenty-five years, Camille Vivier (1977, France) has developed a practice situated at the crossroads of auteur photography and fashion photography. Her work, centred on the body and still life, dialogues with commissions for major magazines.

From these two facets emerges a singular visual language, where sensuality, mystery, and poetry intertwine to question the relationship between the living and the inanimate.

At the heart of her practice, feminine representation, and more particularly the nude, unfolds, drawing on numerous cultural references.

Fascinated by figures of powerful women from fine arts, pop culture, and underground scenes, she also draws from literature, comic books, and early Hollywood icons. Her models assert their presence with strength.

The unconventional bodies of bodybuilders – Sophie, Tjiki, Deborah – constitute a privileged field of exploration.

Through them, the artist engages in a reflection on the plurality of femininities, where the construction of the body and that of identity resonate with the work of sculpture. R. Giger for Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979).

Photography becomes the site of unprecedented rapprochements, where a sometimes unsettling tension is established between human bodies and sculpted bodies, between matter and flesh, between what breathes and what retains its form.

The exhibition traces Camille Vivier’s entire artistic career through a thematic journey bringing together a dozen series and nearly a hundred works: gelatin silver and digital prints, Polaroids, as well as works conceived especially for the exhibition.