An oversized face. Bright red lipstick. Staring straight into the camera. The key visual for BOZAR's exhibition 'Picture Perfect. Beauty through a Contemporary Lens' is taken from Pipilotti Rist's iconic video work Be Nice To Me (Flatten 04) (2000), perfectly encapsulating the exhibition's central premise: beauty is not a constant. It is a construct, a projection, and an instrument of power.
Bringing together 65 international artists from different generations and cultural backgrounds, BOZAR – Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels explores how photography and moving images have shaped - and continue to shape - our understanding of beauty. Curated by Christel Tsilibaris, the exhibition presents photographs and video works spanning the 1960s to the present day, examining how lens-based media have produced, reinforced and ultimately deconstructed dominant Western beauty ideals.
Rather than offering a purely critical survey, 'Picture Perfect' invites visitors to rethink beauty as an expression of diversity, individuality and humanity. Here, beauty is no longer presented as a fixed ideal but as an open space embracing multiple perspectives and identities.
At the heart of the exhibition lies not only the subject of beauty itself, but also the photographic image. Few media have influenced beauty standards as profoundly as photography. Yet it is precisely this medium that artists have employed for decades to expose, challenge and redefine stereotypical gender roles, body ideals and social norms.
The exhibition unfolds through two thematic chapters, 'Deconstruction' and 'Recuperation'. While the first dismantles inherited beauty standards, the second demonstrates how artists reclaim the concept of beauty as a vehicle for self-determination, diversity and empowerment.
Featured artists include Valérie Belin, Kwame Brathwaite, Juno Calypso, Rineke Dijkstra, Sylvie Fleury, Ana Mendieta, Zanele Muholi, ORLAN, Frida Orupabo, Pipilotti Rist, Cindy Sherman, Marianna Simnett, Sin Wai Kin, Hank Willis Thomas and Garry Winogrand, alongside many other internationally acclaimed practitioners whose works reveal the remarkable breadth of contemporary lens-based image-making.
The exhibition has already received enthusiastic international acclaim. The New York Times describes Picture Perfect as an exhibition that revisits contemporary definitions of physical beauty through photographs and videos spanning more than six decades. Belgian newspaper De Standaard sums it up succinctly as "All killer, no filler," praising its compelling examination of more than fifty years of Western beauty ideals.
For curator Christel Tsilibaris, the exhibition aims to broaden our understanding of beauty. Beauty, she argues, should never be seen solely as an ideal or a norm - it has the power both to liberate and to constrain. It is precisely this duality that 'Picture Perfect. Beauty through a Contemporary Lens' explores with remarkable clarity and visual force.
Find out more about the exhibition directly at BOZAR.