Ivonne Thein artwork is interesting, disturbing, shocking and makes you double look and think. Her main photographic subjects are Anorexia, plastic surgery or the perfect beauty and the “Intersexuality”.
The “Proforma” Project:
Plastic surgery until perfection? Or at least until each individual feels perfect! Proforma is a project exploiting the growth of plastic surgery concern in the youth demographic.
The “Beauty” Project:
This work deals with the conflicting priorities of computer manipulated beauties.Even though a symmetric face seems to be more beautiful, a 100% symmetry reminds us more on an alien than a beauty. I’m interested in the relationship between perfect beauty and the creation of an artificial beauty through picture manipulation.
The “Thirty-Two Kilos” Project :
This photograph comes from Ivonne Thein’s series entitled “Thirty-Two Kilos,” which deals with the pathological striving of young men and women to be extremely thin. The background to this work is a phenomenon that emerged in the US already in the 1990s with the Internet movement “Pro Ana,” which elevates anorexia nervosa to the status of a new, positive lifestyle for young women.
The Internet has become the virtual home to diverse communities that do not define themselves as self-help groups for those suffering from eating disorders. Quite the opposite, they support the desire to lose weight, circulating encouraging slogans to help girls achieve the perfect bodies of their dreams. On these sites, this extreme body ideal is illustrated with abundant visual material. Role models are celebrated – for example, female celebrities with anorexia, who seem to embody the connection between extreme physical self-control and a happier and more successful life.
The health risks of this lifestyle, however, disappear from view. At the same time, one also regularly finds photographs on these sites that the trained eye can recognize as having been manipulated.
The “Incomplete” Project:
There are thousands of people in the world, who are not just a men or woman, they are both. These people, called intersexual, own sexual characteristics from male and female. Mostly their parents already decided which gender they should have for their whole live, when they were babies. Many intersexuals feel wrong in their bodies today and get scornful looks, if they behave they feel like and not they look like…
See more of her work at www.ivonnethein.com
