Comunicación con fines de promoción cultural de artistas incluidos en la Colección Fundación María Cristina Masaveu Peterson protegidas por derechos de propiedad intelectual. Prohibida su reproducción, total o parcial, ni tratamiento por cualquier medio ni transmisión o cesión de cualquier forma, sin autorización del titular de los derechos sobre las obras.
© Kooi, Ellen. VEGAP, Madrid 2024
Spaardam-Wolken
TECHNICAL DATA
Author: Ellen Kooi (Leeuwarden, Holanda, 1962)
Title: Spaardam-Wolken
Year: 2011
Technique: ilfo Crystal archive, plexiglass, reynobond
Size: 85 x 220 cm
Edition: 6/6 + 2 PA
This work by Ellen Kooi was presented at the 2012 International Contemporary Art Fair (ARCO) in Madrid, and was acquired by the María Cristina Masaveu Peterson Foundation for its contemporary photography collection. It belongs to the best-known series by the Dutch artist, who has managed to maintain the tradition of “new Dutch photography”, which came about thirty years ago thanks to Rommert Boonstra and Paul de Nooijer, among other authors.
The complex relationships between multiple characters who appear in Kooi’s images reveal strange subjects: children who seem to be playing but are running away; women who seem to be contemplating a distant and bleak horizon, but are warning us about the degradation of the landscape, and lonely, fearful youth uninvolved in their own self and wrapped in magical and dramatic narratives. As in this piece, light occupies this tradition, considering old and new questions and incorporating another perspective on the atmosphere of this nature. With a delicate post-photographic process that draws on symbolic gestures, and certain echoes of German-Romanticism, an atmosphere of mysticism and emphasis that fulfils each of its purposes. Often, that task also relates to the wake of the British Pre-Raphaelites and Scandinavian photography school, forming a moral and intellectual protest against the frivolity and superficiality of things. Her thematic records repeatedly seek the revisionist sense, inspired by historical works that reconstruct and take on part of an intense fiction. Undoubtedly a psychic and non-transferable world.