Jardin Secret: Vee Speers in Luxembourg, and the long life of The Birthday Party

In the autumn of 2016 a small gallery on the rue Louvigny in Luxembourg City hung a room of flowers. The flowers had been photographed in black and white and then coloured by hand, one stem at a time, by an Australian photographer in Paris whose name was known internationally for something else entirely: a series of costumed children, made almost a decade earlier, whose monograph had sold out and whose prints had entered museum and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. Jardin Secret – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (16 Sep – 29 Oct 2016), catalogued here as WPG.09, put both bodies of work in the same rooms. It is the clearest illustration in the gallery's whole programme of a particular kind of commercial-gallery arithmetic: you show the new work, and you hang the famous work next door so that people come.

Exhibition

Jardin Secret (English title Secret Garden) – Wild Project Gallery, Luxembourg (16 Sep – 29 Oct 2016)

Record

WPG.09

Artist

Vee Speers (b. 1962, Australia; based in Paris)

Series shown

Botanica (2016) and The Birthday Party (2007; some gallery records date the prints 2008)

Opening

Vernissage Friday 16 September 2016, from 18h00; the notice announced the artist's presence

Venue

The gallery then operated at 22, rue Louvigny, Luxembourg City (historical address)

Contemporary coverage

L'Œil de la Photographie, 15 Sep 2016, published in French as Jardin Secret and in English as Secret Garden

Position in the programme

Between WPG.07 Cute and Cruel (summer 2016) and WPG.08 Journal intime (from 11 Nov 2016)

What hung in the rooms

The most reliable checklist of the exhibition is the gallery's own exhibition page for the artist, preserved in a Wayback Machine capture made on 30 October 2016 — the day after the show closed. That page divided the presentation into two galleries of images: Botanica, fifteen images, and Birthday Party, fourteen. Twenty-nine works in two series, one made that year and one nine years earlier — the shape of the show as the gallery described it while it was still on the walls.

No installation photography, printed checklist, price list or hanging plan has been located in any archive consulted for this file. Which specific Botanica plates and which specific Birthday Party portraits hung, at what sizes and in what order, is not documented, and the Record stops there. Readers holding a photograph of the rooms, an invitation card or a checklist are asked to send it through the corrections channel.

The objects themselves are documented in the wider gallery record of the two series. Botanica was issued as C-type prints in modest editions: Botanica #19 (Craspedia), 2016, is recorded at 90 × 75 cm in an edition of six with two artist's proofs. The Birthday Party prints of 2007 circulate under a consistent naming convention — Untitled #1 (Diva), Untitled #10 (Terrible Twins), Untitled #11 (Duck), Untitled #12 (School Girl with Doll), Untitled #13 (Chorus Girl), Untitled #15 (Boxer), Untitled #16 (Bubble) — the number carrying the catalogue and the parenthesis carrying the character.

A note on the dates

The chronology on this site carries 16 September 2016 as the opening of WPG.09, which is what the surviving documents give. The gallery's News page announced the run as 16 September – 29 October 2016 with a vernissage on Friday 16 September from 18h00; L'Œil de la Photographie's notice — published on 15 September, the day before — repeated those dates and gave the vernissage as 6pm to 9pm; and the photography-now.com directory entry gives the same run. A second reading exists: the Wix site that replaced the gallery's 2016 pages dated the show 15 September, the day of that first published notice rather than of the opening. The catalogue prints the gallery's own date, the variance is set out source by source in the Record, and the reconciliation is entered in the corrections log.

The same capture shows why dates from this gallery are difficult at all. On 30 October 2016 — with Jardin Secret just closed — the gallery's Expositions index still ended at Cute and Cruel, the Izumi Miyazaki show of the previous summer, with no entry for the Speers exhibition. The show existed as a News item and as a page of images under the artist's name, reachable through the navigation menu, where "Vee SPEERS" sat in an Expositions dropdown the index page itself did not reproduce. Every date in this chronology is assembled against that habit.

Where the title came from

The exhibition title was not invented in Luxembourg. It is lifted from the Botanica statement that still stands on the artist's own website and that L'Œil de la Photographie reproduced in its notice: the series symbolises a moment of peaceful solitude in a world that is becoming increasingly complex, creating a quiet space away from the chaos of everyday life, like a secret garden the artist is carefully cultivating. The gallery took the simile and made it the marquee, in French for the door and in English for the international press — the artist's own image for her working method, borrowed by a dealer who understood it would travel further than the Latin binomials on the labels.

Those labels are worth a sentence of their own. Botanica works are titled by botanical nomenclature — Paeonia, Tulipa Gesneriana, Strelitzia Reginae, Iris Germanica, Papaver Orientale, Clematis, Lotus, Celosia Cristata, Amaryllis, Alstroemeria, Craspedia — the vocabulary of the herbarium rather than the florist. Speers photographs each flower as she photographs a person: frontal, isolated, held still, shot in black and white and then subtly coloured until the hue is not quite the one nature supplied. The same press text calls the results ethereal through their fresh new hues, not natural enough to mirror reality, but animated by a powerful breath of new life, and states that Botanica was being presented in Luxembourg for the first time.

The long life of The Birthday Party

The reason a Luxembourg gallery could fill half a show with nine-year-old photographs is that those photographs had never stopped working. The Birthday Party was made in 2007 and published as a monograph by Dewi Lewis in 2008 — hardback, 96 pages, 44 colour photographs, 330 × 272 mm, ISBN 978-1-904587-64-4. The premise was domestic: Speers conceived the series after her own daughter's birthday party, then pushed the ordinary business of dressing up to an imaginative extreme. The children were posed one by one against the same bare wall, in costume and prop and occasionally mask, gazing straight down the lens inside a strictly composed frame and, in the publisher's phrasing, revealing very little of themselves — which is what makes the portraits magnetic.

The series behaved like a book that had escaped its covers. Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta showed it as a solo exhibition from 13 February to 28 March 2009, and L'Œil de la Photographie was still covering The Birthday Party in London on 24 September 2012. Individual prints are handled to this day by The Photographers' Gallery Print Sales in London. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston lists her in its collections database; her gallery and publisher biographies add the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, 21c Museum in Kentucky, DZ Bank in Frankfurt and the Sir Elton John collection. By 2016, in other words, the masked children were not a back catalogue. They were the reason a room in Luxembourg had visitors.

Same faces, six years on

What kept the series alive is what Speers did to it afterwards. She tracked the same children down and photographed them again in adolescence, against the same wall, dressed and styled by the same method. The re-photographed material appeared as Thirteen (2012) and then as Bulletproof (2013), published as a monograph by Kehrer Verlag in 2014 — 88 pages, 55 colour illustrations, 24 × 29.5 cm, ISBN 978-3-86828-566-6, with an essay by Julie Estève. Estève's text names the earlier costumes precisely, the little raven and the tutu dancer and the wounded boxer, and identifies what the sequel is for: Speers, she writes, eternalises a moment of fragile adolescent beauty, photographing the time before first loss.

A third instalment closed the cycle. Dystopia (2017) set the same generation against Eden-like landscapes and post-apocalyptic ruin — a world that has come unhinged, in the gallery's phrase — and completed a story the gallery dates back ten years to the birthday party. Jackson Fine Art paired the two later series in a single exhibition, Bulletproof & Dystopia, from 13 July to 7 September 2018. What began as costumes against a wall had become a longitudinal project following one small cohort across a decade, and the Luxembourg show caught the arc in the middle: the children on one wall, the flowers on the other, made by the same procedure and lit by the same instinct for stillness.

The record since 2016

Speers's activity after Jardin Secret is continuous and, unlike some of the roster documented in this archive, easy to date. Dystopia followed in 2017, then Fashioned from Nature in 2018, made on a commission from the V&A in London for its exhibition of the same name on fashion and the environment, which ran there from 21 April 2018 to 27 January 2019; the series reached Portugal for her first solo exhibition in that country, opening at In the Pink Gallery from 27 January 2023 and announced by The Portugal News on 20 January. Phoenix, made across 2019 and 2020, drew on the legend of the phoenix for a series of portraits of women, and was shown at Jackson Fine Art from 19 March to 30 April 2022. Transcendence (2023) — Gaia, Flower, Thistles, Crown, Globe, Orchids — kept the figure but pushed it towards Renaissance statuary, the gallery describing its central quadriptych as a meditation on the human relationship to nature. In 2024 the Princeton University Art Museum included her in Under a Southern Star: Identity and Environment in Australian Photography at its Art on Hulfish gallery, 17 August 2024 – 5 January 2025, showing her Guilty Not Guilty video work of hand-coloured mug shots against Australia's convict past.

Her most recent body of work is The King's Court, dated 2025 and released through Jackson Fine Art. The premise is Versailles under Louis XV: in a statement circulated with the release, Speers describes a bored and taciturn young king requiring constant diversion, festivities organised around no particular theme, and the courtesans, favourites and dancers who filled them, and says she invited dancers to collaborate and used the flow and rhythm of movement to build a narrative in the register of that court. The works are chromogenic dye coupler prints. Queen, The King's Court, 2025, is offered by the gallery in three formats — 24 × 20 in and 39 × 31 in, each in an edition of eight plus two artist's proofs, and 59 × 47 in in an edition of five plus an artist's proof — signed on a label verso. The published titles include Cage, Kaftan, Moon, Shell, Birds, Plume, Sun, Brushstroke, Fan, Fall, Fruit, Matador, Magician, Paper Dress, Mirror, Gold Horns and Le Favori.

What The King's Court does not yet have is coverage. As of the date on this file, the material in the public record consists of the gallery's own release, the artist's own website, marketplace listings for individual prints, and a single notice in L'Œil de la Photographie dated 1 July 2026 that reproduces the artist's statement. Jackson Fine Art's exhibitions index lists four Vee Speers exhibitions — The Birthday Party (2009), Immortal (2011), Bulletproof & Dystopia (2018) and Phoenix (2022) — and no dated exhibition of The King's Court. No independent review has been located. The newest work by an artist with three sold-out monographs and museum holdings exists publicly as a gallery page and nothing else — a fair warning about how thin the record can be even when the artist is anything but obscure.

Afterwards, on the rue Louvigny

The gallery moved on quickly. Journal intime, the Arny Schmit show catalogued as WPG.08, opened from 11 November 2016; the 2017 season ran through Alvin Booth's Nocturnes, Cédric Delsaux's Dark Celebration for the European Month of Photography, and Angelo Musco's The Body Behind the Body, after which the documented exhibition programme stops. Speers stayed on the roster to the end: the Wix-era site that replaced the 2016 pages kept a page under her name, captured in November 2019 and still standing in the capture of 24 May 2022, months before the site went dark. The full institutional arc is set out in the Record, and the general problem it exemplifies in When a gallery closes.

Seen from here, Jardin Secret reads as the most conventional show the gallery mounted and, for that reason, the most legible. The Miyazaki exhibition that preceded it was a bet on a art-school graduate with a Tumblr account. The Speers show was the opposite kind of transaction: an established artist with three monographs and a museum-collected series, bringing new work to a market that would come for the old. What survives of it is twenty-nine images divided between two galleries on a page that has not existed for four years, an opening date that the gallery's two successive websites gave differently, and a title borrowed from a sentence about the artist's own quiet.