Please join us for
the
OPENING
Thursday, April 7, 6 - 8
PM
Ruud van Empel
Wonder
New Photoworks
April 7 -
May 14,
2011
Wonder, 2010,
cibachrome, dibond, plexiglas, 49 x 116 in, 124 x 294
cm
Stux Gallery is pleased to announce, "Wonder," our
4th and latest exhibition of large-scale digital-composite
photographic works by Dutch artist Ruud van
Empel.
Van Empel creates photo-collages by meticulously
stitching together fragments taken from an archive of thousands of images the
artist photographs himself. Upon viewing the pristinely rendered images,
however, no obvious trace of van Empel's
Photoshop technique is evident. The viewer is instead drawn
into van Empel's subtly conflicting worlds which
simultaneously appear impossibly illusory and undeniably hyper-real.
Portrayed as children alone, in pairs, or large groups, van
Empel's subjects seem to be held captive in tantalizingly magical moments
of sexualized innocence. Locating his subjects in various scenes of
wilderness or minimal quotidian environments, they appear lost in a liminal
state between youth and adulthood, psychologically invoking the kinds of
"in-between" subjects captured in, for instance, Rineke Dijkstra's photographs
of adolescents. Van Empel's Generation series contains three
different photographic works, each a panoramic view of what would appear as an
otherwise ordinary class photo of a group of a few dozen young students.
Each photograph, however, presents the uneasy reality of a seemingly
mono-cultural student body. In one, an entire class of presumably Jewish
children (most of whom wear the traditional kippah) is portrayed; another
is composed entirely of black children and a third consists almost entirely of
white children.
Van Empel's images tackle the problem of representation
by over-representing. Van Empel offers hyperbolized
representations of childhood and identity (race, gender, sexuality). One may
notice that van Empel's photographs contain almost no depth of
field. With this flattening out-everything is in focus-background and foreground
appear equally detailed; context is replaced with fantasy, and the original
photographic subject elides with its new function as icon. In van
Empel's work appearance is but one component within a complex of
relations completing the connection between image and
reality.
Van Empel's viscerally
seductive photo-collages are most powerful as metaphor. They compel us to
consider the entangled problematic of identity as a collage of forces, "race,"
for example, as beyond a purely socially-produced phenomenon secondary to
class distinctions (to paraphrase the traditional Marxian and Frankfurt School
lines of thought), while outside the construal of "essences" thought to belong
to particular ethnically-related groups. Art historian Maartje van den
Heuvel has argued, "Ruud van Empel is not primarily concerned with whether the
portrayed people are black or white," but the artist "finds himself in the
socially charged position of a white man who portrays blacks." The
situation is transposed by moving the work of the Dutch artist to the context of
an exhibition in the U.S. where contemporary issues of race rely less on
migration as such and have more to do with historical social policy and current
economic
conditions.
Born in 1958 in Breda, The Netherlands, Ruud van Empel lives and works in Amsterdam.
Van Empel studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Sint Joost Breda. Since the late
1990s, van Empel has appeared in solo and group exhibitions in the U.S., Europe,
and Asia. His work appears in the permanent collections of the French National
Foundation for Modern Art (Paris), Museum of photographic Arts (San Diego),
Generali Foundation (Vienna), Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and CB Collection (Tokyo).
This year in addition to solo exhibitions at Stux Gallery (New York) and Paris
Beijing Photo Gallery (Beijing), a major retrospective of van Empel's work will
be presented at the Groninger Museum (The
Netherlands).