Yvonne Michiels
1966, The Netherlands
In her art, Yvonne Michiels tells personal stories about beauty, emotions and mortality. She uses topical examples from modern society. Resulting in aesthetic, innovative portraits. Her works are characterised by the unusual techniques that she uses, bearing a highly personal signature. Yvonne portrays fashion-conscious women who view the world with a confident eye. These women comply with the dominant ideal of beauty achievable through make-up, fashion and plastic surgery. They therefore look perfect. But appearances can be deceiving. The perfect facades conceal feelings of insecurity, despair and vulnerability. As victims of society´s obsession with fashion, beauty and perfection, these women suffer from the compulsion to strive for the partially self-imposed ideal image.

Yvonne Michiels
The loaded photos are emotionally charged which in turn transmits to the viewer. Vulnerability is a major theme, and is a recurring motif threaded through Yvonne’s work.
In her latest series, she examines this theme from the viewpoint of the threats she increasingly sees people around her struggling with. Yvonne subtly ‘projects’ the threats onto her models, emphasising the contrast between beauty and health, on one side, and decline and mortality on the other. Upon studying the images further, tremendous stratification behind the ‘image of beauty’ is discovered.Yvonne Michiels has successfully exhibited on the international scene for a number of years.