Hellen
Van Meene

Since the mid-1990s Dutch artist Hellen van Meene has presented photographic works primarily featuring young girls. Taking as her models acquaintances, or girls scouted on the street, Van Meene makes idiosyncratic, ad hoc changes to their hair, clothing etc. and has them pose with the idea of crafting fictitious realms. Captured amid delicate hues recalling the distinctive light of the historical paintings of her native land, the girls stand, often with eyes downcast, in these quiet moments of introspection offering glimpses of the instability of feeling adrift, and the imperfect beauty, that accompany the process of growing up.

Initially Van Meene photographed girls in rural Dutch towns, but in “City of Girls” displayed at the Japan Pavilion of the Venice Biennale International Architecture Exhibition in 2000, for the first time experimented with photographing girls from other cities. There she focused on 13-year-old Japanese girls still caught between the restrictions and freedoms of the country’s social system, viewing them as bellwethers of change in contemporary Japanese cities. The works were exhibited outdoors, in a distinctive setup that allowed visitors to view the fleeting figures of the girls in the dappled light beneath trees.

“Tokyo Girls” unveiled in 2005 features girls the artist encountered in the Japanese capital. None of these photos shot intuitively in ten minutes or so against a simple backdrop have a title; nor are they portraits in the traditional sense. As Van Meene notes, “This is not just you, now. This is a sense of you, created by me” and accordingly, what emerges here is not the girls’ innermost state of mind, or their individuality, or some model of girlhood, but Van Meene’s imaginary world in which she approaches her subjects merely as living material, or objects subject to direction.

Like “Tokyo Girls,” “The Secret Lives of Girls” (2012) was commissioned by The New York Times Magazine. It featured five young female actors nominated for Academy Awards in 2010. In Van Meene’s gentle light, these girls whose moment it was to shine in the world of the silver screen, are noble in demeanor, yet simultaneously wear expressions not unakin to melancholy and confusion. Like Van Meene’s other works, this one featuring a clever interplay of fiction and reality on the picture plane excites the viewer’s imagination as a story able to be read many ways.

The series unveiled at 2012’s “Dogs and Girls” exhibition at Gallery Koyanagi, meanwhile, introduced a new theme. Fascinated by a photo of a dog from the 1920s she spied one day at a friend’s home, Van Meene set aside a fear of the animals resulting from being bitten as a child, and threw herself into photographing them. As in her work with girls, she followed instinct to choose the subjects, and the dogs captured using the same technique present as stately figures reminiscent of Old Master paintings. Other photographs, pairing girls with dogs in furnished rooms, tell of a further broadening in thematic material, and new creative development.

In 2024 and 2025, Van Meene travelled to Mardin and Diyarbakır in southeastern Turkey. Located in Upper Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates, the region is considered one of the cradles of human civilization. The resulting new portrait series explores the contrast between this rich historical heritage and the challenging realities faced by many Kurdish families today.