Marie Wynants

“Impulse, response. A blink of my eye. I capture the instant. I freeze the body in midair.” – Marie Wynants (2016)

When Marie Wynants was 14 years old , she left the regular high school system to delve into the world of dance. She enrolled at the Antwerp School of Arts and the following five years she devoted herself to contemporary dance repertoires and the analysis of bodywork.

Being confronted on a daily basis with the rigour and the demand for perfection present in the contemporary dance scene, she developed a strong feel for aesthetics. She slowly learned to see dance movements as visual patterns and how these are linked with emotional expression. Slowly drawn to photography she got intrigued by the way images of the human body are conceptualised in the present day society. The inherent elegance of the human body and it’s physical limitations are the central theme through her artistic output.

“I like to play, I like to watch, I like to direct, I like to explore – I’m shooting for memories, shifting for thoughts”.

While enrolled as a visual arts student at the LUCA School of Arts in Brussels she slowly refined her passion for the imagery of the human body. Her years as a photography student saw her experimenting with different dancers & models, slowly developing her own unique photographic reality. She started shooting with unique characters that fascinated her, for music bands with a personality, photo’s for record sleeves and as a visual director for videoclips.

Aside from her shoots with fashion brands like Ann Demeulemeester, Delvaux, an exclusive spot at the 2016’s International Photofestival of Knokke, multiple awards and nominations for her work as a video director, Marie Wynants most importantly became critically acclaimed with her iconic pictures from her longtime friend and visual instigator, Max Colombie – front man of Belgian pop band “Oscar & The Wolf”.

Guided by her own experience of meticulously and constantly being watched as a dancer, Marie Wynants developed a gift to direct others in order to express her own inner reality. Her background in contemporary dance is not only a constant influence on her body of work, it is the driving force behind the persona that Marie Wynants became over the last couple of years.