Picture Perfect: sixty-five artists take apart the idea of beauty
From the bathroom mirror to the feed, the pressure to look picture-perfect is not an abstraction. Bozar has built an exhibition around it: sixty-five artists, working in photography, film and video from the 1970s to today, on how lens-based media created Western beauty standards, enforced them, and then turned on them.
"The choice of lens-based media artworks emphasizes the strong link between beauty and photography," says curator Christel Tsilibaris. "It highlights how crucial it has been as a tool for promoting aesthetic trends and beauty products." The camera taught people what to want and then put itself in their pocket.
The show runs in two directions at once — deconstruction and recuperation. It traces where the standards came from, through centuries of art history and then mass media and algorithms, and it follows artists who took them apart from the 1970s onward through self-portraiture, performance, appropriation and documentary. And it makes room for the other move: artists who reclaim beauty as something relational and emancipatory, built out of vulnerability, ageing, queerness, hybridity and difference.
Among the names: Cindy Sherman, Martha Rosler, Ana Mendieta, Hannah Wilke, ORLAN, Zanele Muholi, Rineke Dijkstra, Pipilotti Rist, Sanja Iveković, Kwame Brathwaite, Sara Cwynar, Frida Orupabo, Sin Wai Kin, Hank Willis Thomas, Garry Winogrand, Zed Nelson, Yuki Kihara.
Zoë Gray, Bozar's director of exhibitions, is careful about the tone: "In a world that is quick to pass judgement, this exhibition is the opposite of judgemental. Instead it is open, generous, playful and inspiring." The final room is Bozar Arcade, a selection of artist-made video games on the same theme, including a new commission you can play.
The show runs alongside Bellezza e Bruttezza, on beauty and ugliness in the Renaissance — the same argument, five centuries earlier.
Picture Perfect. Beauty through a Contemporary Lens runs from 7 March to 16 August 2026 at Bozar, Rue Ravensteinstraat 23, Brussels.
Photos: BOZAR, Brussels