Nadia Plesner

Nothing can piss people off better than an illustration or a caricature. Nadia Plesner (and other Dutch illustrators mostly of Mohammad) should know that. The Danish artist working and living in the Netherlands got sued in April 2008 by Louis Vuitton and attracted publicity to the burning problems of agenda setting in the media and the trend to replace the genocide in Darfur my spicy juicy gossip about celebrities.

Nadia Plesner was born 1981 in Frederiksberg in Denmark. Her father, the owner of a local newspaper and her mother, a secretary at a hospital, divorced before Plesner was born and she grew up in two homes.

She became famous for the drawing Simple Living in which she portrayed a Darfur child holding a small dog and a caricature of a Louis Vuitton bag as a comment on the media’s prioritizing “news” making the front page. In April 2008 Louis Vuitton demanded that she should pay 15,000 euros for each day she continued the campaign. Plesner received support from different politicians as well as the UN in New York. Unable to afford the ongoing help from attorneys and realizing that the case would take between 5 and 10 years in court, Plesner decided to cease the sales of the Simple Living t-shirts in June 2008 and started a new campaign, Simple Living 2.

Here are some of her finest critical pieces of art.

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