Street Artist Vermibus Subverts the Cult of Beauty

Street artist Vermibus has a thing for beauty advertisements. The Berlin-based graffito roves the streets removing the posters, then takes them back to his studio where he uses solvent to remove the faces and flesh of the models. Vermibus then takes the remixed posters, which look almost Lynchian in their warped beauty, back out onto the streets and into their original context.

For his latest work, Unveiling Beauty, Vermibus ups his game. In September 2015, he followed the route of the most influential Fashion Weeks, which took him to New York, London, Milan and Paris. As with past projects, Vermibus staged a series of public interventions in these cities with his repurposed posters, or "subvertisements," if you like.

“The beauty-cult is as firmly established on the catwalks of every Fashion Week as it is in the advertising they generate,” Vermibus says. “The fashion industry uses the body as a tool in order to sell products, sell consumerism. The image of the body in advertisements limits and oppresses an individual’s true beauty, concealing it behind the false rhetoric of its own liberation.”

“Unveiling Beauty, as the name suggests, reveals the beauty that lies hidden behind the make-up and the retouching that are used within the fashion industry and also as it publicly stages itself through advertising," he adds.

Vermibus - Unveiling Beauty from Vermibus on Vimeo.

Click here to see more of Vermibus’s work.

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