Elizabeth Koning

Before her career in fine art photography, Elizabeth Koning managed an Italian modeling agency with the otherworldly muses of the Milanese In-Crowd. She danced with the more decadent temptations in life: tantric island dance parties, penthouse perspectives, and an endless flow of champagne. The scene was lively, sexy, and provocative.

Galvanised by a new cultural awareness, after fifteen years Koning moved back to the Netherlands and established an iconic style of portraiture that seemingly marries the finesse of Italian Renaissance painting with reinvented Dutch settings. To look at a photograph by Koning is to be transported through a cloud of sfumato and into an older time. The rolling hills of Italy have been replaced with the landscape of the Low Countries, while cloudy skies light the models in a spiritual glow. But what are these figures conveying to us with their eyes?

For The Public House of Art and ‘The Devil Inside Me’ exhibition, Koning developed a series where each artwork quietly reflects the inner struggle with one of the seven deadly sins. Represented in their Latin names, Superbia, Luxuria, Invidia; these serene and tranquil figures come with a touch of the strange, as each grapples with her pride, lust, envy and so on. Are they the symbolic children of Eve? We’ve all felt the same sting of sinful thinking at one point or another, let these artworks wash you of your sins while they absorb every last devilish thought, like the Dorian Gray of our faults.