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In her photobook “Venus & Mercury”, Dutch photographer Viviane Sassen radically re-envisions the Palace of Versailles in France. Given free reign within its endless gardens, interiors and art exhibitions, Sassen used her sensibilities and her freedom to cast the opulence and history of one of the world’s most famous buildings as the side characters in a photographic play about sex, power, beauty, history, gender and art. In more than one hundred photographs, Sassen experiments with shapes and motifs and forms and themes and colors in surprising and stimulating ways. A series of poems by Dutch writer Marjolijn van Heemstra adds further intrigue and complexity to Sassen’s extensive montage.

Each copy of “Venus & Mercury” comes in a hardcover box hand-painted by Viviane Sassen.