'I only did Victoria's Secret so I could fuck a supermodel, and I did.'

So announced Rie Rasmussen after her walk down this particular runway in 2001. An unapologetically loud voice during the two years she spent in fashion, she seems just as difficult to bypass as an artist, film maker and actress. Indeed, her work speaks for itself. Her powerful and widely acclaimed work in film - (her debut Thinning the Herd, a thriller short, was nominated for a Palme d'Or at Cannes in 2004, and her first feature length film, Human Zoo, premiered at the Berlinale film festival last year to favourable reviews) - is inspiring enough, but it is her paintings that pull me in.




I admire this work. It manages to convey the depth of the raw emotion involved in sex between men and women without a romantic overtone; there is tenderness, for me, illustrated in the softness of the markmaking, but it is interspersed with a drama that sometimes verges on aggression. They are very primal stories, and, I think, all the more stunning and beautiful for that.