These Self-portraits remind us of historic female archetypes and bring to mind a mysterious beauty that we would typically associate with the classical age of portraiture, but the post-modern aesthetic long ago replaced Renaissance concepts of idealised beauty with a more playful approach or even outright rejection in favour of unfathomable idea-based work. Van Zeijl dips into the post-modern to craft a vision of feminine power that will have you questioning both historical and 21st-century concepts of beauty. At first glance, one might mistake van Zeijl’s portraits for subversive portrayals of noblewomen painted by Dutch Golden Age Masters. Trough the exploration and manipulation of the visual vocabulary of the past and the implementation of modern photographic technology, her work possesses a timeless beauty, transcending the boundaries of epoch and media.
