Until the mid-1990s, Van Empel created his photographic assemblages using traditional collaging techniques of cutting pasting and retouching. In 1995 Van Empel switched to a digital process, using a computer to create his conceptual photographs. Using a vast stock of digital photo’s to create his photographs, Van Empel changed the face of digital fine-art photography. On the basis of this art-historical reference, Van Empel created a new genre within photography – without a ready-to-wear label. The artist himself speaks of the ‘construction of a photographic image, or photo objects’. Although he does make use of pure photomontage – he never applies so-called morphing techniques – in his final image he strives for a naturalism and realism as opposed to a surrealist approach. The artificiality is visible but the final image is a convincing, autonomous reality. Although produced digitally, Van Empel’s images are unique, each being built up of different combinations of photo’s. He uses photography as an independent form of depiction. Though digitally produced, the camera and photography remain at the heart of his practice. Every image consists of photographs taken by himself, which are then digitally assembled on the computer. The camera provides the building blocks of his compositions. Van Empel’s works are constructed down to the minutest of details, in which he considers the exact placement of every element, giving his images a sense of idealized perfection. Though created in the digital age using the most up-to-date techniques, Van Empel’s work defies temporal structures and instead represent universal themes.
Text by Alex de Vries
Text by Alex de Vries
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RUUD VAN EMPEL SEISMOLOGIST OF AN IMAGE AGE
We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.
Cooper, Interstellar
Do you recognize the feeling? Out of panic and survival instinct, a group of people start walking in a certain direction. You hesitate, wait and seem crazy when you are the only one who remains still. You make an opposing decision and abandon the herd behavior…. The outcome is highly uncertain, but at least you make an informed choice.
In a time where the herd literally answers all emotions with a thumbs up and digitizes a one-sided catalog of feelings in an average of 280 characters via social media, I consider Ruud van Empel to be such a “madman. He remains standing, looks around attentively and realizes that he is part of a visual culture that can best be described over the last thirty years as a tangle of ideas and ideologies that become visible mainly at a crossroads of financial capital and (visual) information technology. In other words, our capitalist society has ensured in an inimitable way that we are more formatted in our thinking and actions than ever before and we present ourselves to the world in a quasi-identical way.
That visual culture plays an important role in today’s formatted and homogenized social narratives is obvious. The Techboys, who reward herd behavior as purebred popularizers, have embraced data-driven visual culture as an ideal ally from the outset Everyone is sensitive to images, after all. As a result, more than ever, visual culture is also understood in economic terms and handled as “visual capital,” and that visual capital, by stubbornly defining what is “own” and what is “foreign,” continually sets the social debate on edge.
Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of digitization in the mid-1990s and the accompanying identity crisis of the medium of photography. The “truthful” analog photography was exchanged for a digital question mark without too much pretension to truth. In other words, the emergence of digital photography immediately neatly sanitized and retouched the soil of the Big Truths, to the extent that roughly thirty years later illustrated fake news has become indispensable to public debate. This kind of formatted, usually staged polarization – fake versus real – plays out in many areas of society (politics, ecology, culture, economics…) and over the last few decades has become a convincing business model with profiteering potential. In short, “image capitalism. A capitalism driven by algorithms that gradually makes our consumption of images indigestible. It is this ‘image capitalism’ that now feeds daily on a digital toolbox; an inexhaustible source of seemingly visually infallible, but above all ruthless social perspectives. Everything is possible. But what is really possible today?
Such visual upheavals not only form the background to van Empel’s entire career, it is also the hybrid raw material for his graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal images. A vast visual habitat with which van Empel likes to rearrange our relationship to the image. Van Empel directs that habitat with a tight hand and, like one of his points of reference, filmmaker Roman Polański, possesses the visual acumen to make both the cultivated and the brutal speak in detail. Before I expand on that, however, it is appropriate, with respect to our viewing of Van Empel’s work, to clear up some misunderstandings.
Botox exoticism
Indeed, a viewer looking at Ruud van Empel’s work with a cursory glance is often tempted to consider the technicality of the images as an exotic, almost surreal variant of the cultural homogenization described earlier. Yet here I want to put an immediate end to this kind of botox exoticism. For it crops up all too often in reactions surrounding Van Empel’s work in which technical elaboration comes to dominate the final judgment of the work.
The way in which these images have been technically created since the mid-1990s obviously forms an important foundation in van Empel’s oeuvre. The work develops during the late 1980s from an analogous thinking and acting (the pure photomontage) into what van Empel describes today as a “technical naturalism” or even “a form of realism. In any case, far away from what that unsuspecting observer rather appoints as an exotic, surrealistic approach. These are statements that obviously based on the ingenious digital thinking that van Empel employs, but surrealism, no, it is not. Van Empel is not a seasoned surrealist who pursues the unreal. On the contrary. Rational thinking remains a core concept in all of Ruud van Empel’s series in which, in contrast to surrealism, visual and textual imagination are never detached from reason and logic. So no surrealistic fabrications that have been created with the aid of, for example, digital morphing techniques. But an ‘autonomous reality’ as van Empel prefers to define it. Digitally produced, but first photographed with the camera within often self-designed, tangible (studio) settings. It forms the core of an artist’s practice in which the visual material created by van Empel is then digitally assembled down to the smallest details. And even though they refer to each other in van Empel’s work, the analog and the digital also function here perfectly alongside and without any knowledge of each other.
Perfectionism is an imaginary, philosophical concept
That this results in what many critics describe as a “beautiful,” “dreamy,” “sweet universe” with a number of “images perfected to the ultimate level” is not only a second misunderstanding but also a deliberate trap. We may never see or hear van Empel from the barricades, any form of activism is alien to him, but the insight that an image is never neutral and transcends the perceptible is always a masterstroke in van Empel’s work. Thus Van Empel rightly considers perfectionism as a imaginary, philosophical concept and not necessarily a merely simplistic, observable one. Striving for perfection is human, undoubtedly seductive and socially more topical and popular than ever. But the result today is plainly baffling. An observation that does not escape van Empel either.
Since perfectionism has become the social measure of things – the landscape, the living room, the partner… preferably all as perfect as possible – and in the process uses visual culture as a grateful and cheap accelerant, we also fall into the trap more than ever. A lot of people, not least strongly driven by a ruthless image culture that goes wild via social media, still do not understand why the perfect life does not exist and is unrealistic. Indeed, the perfect life is imaginary, elusive, unrealistic, let alone desirable. A realization that is barely gaining ground socially because the prevailing visual culture is eager to convince us otherwise.
When a goal is unrealistic – which perfection is – it even becomes potentially dangerous: “In an attempt to take a perfect selfie at a waterfall, five young women fell off a cliff in India. This recent and certainly not the last incident in the addictive search for perfection, in casu the perfect image, also indirectly illustrates the way we often look at Ruud van Empel’s “perfect” work. We are attracted by an idea of perfection but few see the real challenge. Indeed, the ‘technical perfection’ so much talked about in van Empel’s work is not a goal, but a deliberate means. An invitation, following the imaginary, philosophical concept of “perfection,” to look at other philosophical themes within Van Empel’s work in a way that transcends notions of technicality, analog or digital mastery.
Defiant imagination
So, what type of sculptor is up to this? What are we actually looking at when we behold Ruud Van Empel’s “perfect” images? The answer is as simple as it is complex: contrary imagination wrapped in stylistic, visually appealing concepts and ideas. For more than technique, genre or any other categorization we rather too often steal from the Great Register of Art History to say something about a photograph, this photographic work is a philosophical history of themes.
Van Empel turns temporal structures and universal themes inside out and proves how we can make images today from a much-needed trans literacy. Trans literacy understood as an artist’s position, as a conscious choice to adopt a literate and intellectual position within the prevailing visual culture. With and in images. But, as van Empel immediately adds, it is not only the making of these kinds of images that is important today, but also how we as viewers can look at images more critically and, above all, why we should look at images more attentively. In the way in which through this oeuvre, for example, the strongly evolving asymmetry can be deciphered in the relationship between those who look and others who are looked at, it seems as if van Empel has been challenging the ubiquitous visual gaze on its merits for almost four decades now.
All of these image series embody this asymmetry. Photo Sketch (1995- 2003), The Office (1995-1998, 2001), Study for Women – The Naarden Studies (1999-2000) or more recently Souvenir, Souvenir d’intime (2008, 2015) are issues that give van Empel’s oeuvre that special, philosophical temperament.
Complemented by van Empel’s views on themes that have been subject to seismic shifts in recent decades that are surfacing all over the world and, consequently, in the inseparable visual culture. We see those shifts in image series when van Empel clearly reflects on notions of cultural appropriation (Still Life, 2014-2015, 2017) or perfection versus imperfection (Theatre, 2010-2013). But also about nature as an undeniably political fact (Voyage Pittoresque, 2016-2019 and Floresta, Floresta Negra, 2018), a digital world that more than ever eludes the analog world (Unititled, Study in Green, 2003-2004), the artist who archives to forget (Generation, Wonder, Club, 2010-2011), molding the notion of beauty into a disturbing yet effective visual attack strategy in the face of narrow-minded notions (Collage, 2017) or abstract landscapes (Pollution, 2022) in which absolute freedom of expression manifests itself as a unique, slightly rebellious signature. They are reflections all contained in this body of work. Those who look back on this time, say fifty years from now, may find in van Empel a man of honor who perfectly captures the moral epoch in his oeuvre.
Moral rearmament
Ruud van Empel takes a challenging approach in every series. Never non-committal, but extremely thoughtful and usually on the basis of a playing field that repeatedly confronts you with a number of confrontational facts forces you to face a number of facts. In recent years, for example, World (2005-2008, 2010, 2017) received a lot of attention. Within the Christian tradition, the white child is a form of standard iconography to represent innocence. From the idea that black children are just as innocent as white children, Van Empel has visually redefined the concept regarding guilt and innocence.
World, which deals with black innocence, was already an unmistakable statement in 2005 that has lost nothing of its topicality to this day. On the contrary. In the wake of the worldwide events surrounding the death of George Floyd in 2020, that same black skin has become a political statement for many viewers. To many, what van Empel does in World is a form of gratuitous cynicism, but nothing could be further from the truth. Cynicism is a wry joke that dare not face the truth. Van Empel thinks differently. He is more human, more engaged and more sincere. He is, including with a statement like World, ahead of his time. Far away from any kind of cynicism. It brings me to a stimulating slogan: ‘The visual language of Ruud van Empel offers the moral rearmament that our visual culture needs’! Free of pomposity, populism and leaden moralism, but with a finely tuned sight towards people and their environment. A view that with Van Empel is characterized by reason and compassion and consciously reveals itself as a necessary plea for a new humanism. A humanism that recognizes the facts; we are improving overall, but at the same time also a humanism that fully realizes that we as humanity are firmly under pressure. Not least because of the prevailing skepticism and broad-based demagoguery that undermines confidence in scientific, inclusive and, above all, reasonable thinking. In Ruud van Empel’s work, it produces a form of magical thinking, a thinking around what is possible. For if we wish to continue to describe visual culture effectively as an expression of human expression, as well as communication between people, then Ruud van Empel’s oeuvre is an offer you can’t refuse.
In a quasi-uniform visual culture where everything is customized and personalized, Ruud van Empel’s work presents a beautiful paradox. Like a seismologist who scientifically records the vibrations in our visual culture and at the same time fully realizes that what you see depends not only on the context, your knowledge, your personality or your cultural baggage, but especially on the unpredictable moment. That’s where you make the difference as an artist. The moment when you decide to walk with the herd. Or not. And the latter has been a deliberate and masterful choice for van Empel for decades. Call it Van Empel’s avant-garde, a positively colored philosophy of life and an oeuvre that can be described as the necessary “experimental vanguard. Only in this way can Ruud van Empel carefully portray an image of the era. And meticulousness is far from perfection.
Christoph Ruys, former director of the Photography Museum Antwerpen FoMU
We used to look up at the sky and wonder at our place in the stars, now we just look down and worry about our place in the dirt.
Cooper, Interstellar
Do you recognize the feeling? Out of panic and survival instinct, a group of people start walking in a certain direction. You hesitate, wait and seem crazy when you are the only one who remains still. You make an opposing decision and abandon the herd behavior…. The outcome is highly uncertain, but at least you make an informed choice.
In a time where the herd literally answers all emotions with a thumbs up and digitizes a one-sided catalog of feelings in an average of 280 characters via social media, I consider Ruud van Empel to be such a “madman. He remains standing, looks around attentively and realizes that he is part of a visual culture that can best be described over the last thirty years as a tangle of ideas and ideologies that become visible mainly at a crossroads of financial capital and (visual) information technology. In other words, our capitalist society has ensured in an inimitable way that we are more formatted in our thinking and actions than ever before and we present ourselves to the world in a quasi-identical way.
That visual culture plays an important role in today’s formatted and homogenized social narratives is obvious. The Techboys, who reward herd behavior as purebred popularizers, have embraced data-driven visual culture as an ideal ally from the outset Everyone is sensitive to images, after all. As a result, more than ever, visual culture is also understood in economic terms and handled as “visual capital,” and that visual capital, by stubbornly defining what is “own” and what is “foreign,” continually sets the social debate on edge.
Perhaps this is an inevitable consequence of digitization in the mid-1990s and the accompanying identity crisis of the medium of photography. The “truthful” analog photography was exchanged for a digital question mark without too much pretension to truth. In other words, the emergence of digital photography immediately neatly sanitized and retouched the soil of the Big Truths, to the extent that roughly thirty years later illustrated fake news has become indispensable to public debate. This kind of formatted, usually staged polarization – fake versus real – plays out in many areas of society (politics, ecology, culture, economics…) and over the last few decades has become a convincing business model with profiteering potential. In short, “image capitalism. A capitalism driven by algorithms that gradually makes our consumption of images indigestible. It is this ‘image capitalism’ that now feeds daily on a digital toolbox; an inexhaustible source of seemingly visually infallible, but above all ruthless social perspectives. Everything is possible. But what is really possible today?
Such visual upheavals not only form the background to van Empel’s entire career, it is also the hybrid raw material for his graphic, optical, perceptual, mental and verbal images. A vast visual habitat with which van Empel likes to rearrange our relationship to the image. Van Empel directs that habitat with a tight hand and, like one of his points of reference, filmmaker Roman Polański, possesses the visual acumen to make both the cultivated and the brutal speak in detail. Before I expand on that, however, it is appropriate, with respect to our viewing of Van Empel’s work, to clear up some misunderstandings.
Botox exoticism
Indeed, a viewer looking at Ruud van Empel’s work with a cursory glance is often tempted to consider the technicality of the images as an exotic, almost surreal variant of the cultural homogenization described earlier. Yet here I want to put an immediate end to this kind of botox exoticism. For it crops up all too often in reactions surrounding Van Empel’s work in which technical elaboration comes to dominate the final judgment of the work.
The way in which these images have been technically created since the mid-1990s obviously forms an important foundation in van Empel’s oeuvre. The work develops during the late 1980s from an analogous thinking and acting (the pure photomontage) into what van Empel describes today as a “technical naturalism” or even “a form of realism. In any case, far away from what that unsuspecting observer rather appoints as an exotic, surrealistic approach. These are statements that obviously based on the ingenious digital thinking that van Empel employs, but surrealism, no, it is not. Van Empel is not a seasoned surrealist who pursues the unreal. On the contrary. Rational thinking remains a core concept in all of Ruud van Empel’s series in which, in contrast to surrealism, visual and textual imagination are never detached from reason and logic. So no surrealistic fabrications that have been created with the aid of, for example, digital morphing techniques. But an ‘autonomous reality’ as van Empel prefers to define it. Digitally produced, but first photographed with the camera within often self-designed, tangible (studio) settings. It forms the core of an artist’s practice in which the visual material created by van Empel is then digitally assembled down to the smallest details. And even though they refer to each other in van Empel’s work, the analog and the digital also function here perfectly alongside and without any knowledge of each other.
Perfectionism is an imaginary, philosophical concept
That this results in what many critics describe as a “beautiful,” “dreamy,” “sweet universe” with a number of “images perfected to the ultimate level” is not only a second misunderstanding but also a deliberate trap. We may never see or hear van Empel from the barricades, any form of activism is alien to him, but the insight that an image is never neutral and transcends the perceptible is always a masterstroke in van Empel’s work. Thus Van Empel rightly considers perfectionism as a imaginary, philosophical concept and not necessarily a merely simplistic, observable one. Striving for perfection is human, undoubtedly seductive and socially more topical and popular than ever. But the result today is plainly baffling. An observation that does not escape van Empel either.
Since perfectionism has become the social measure of things – the landscape, the living room, the partner… preferably all as perfect as possible – and in the process uses visual culture as a grateful and cheap accelerant, we also fall into the trap more than ever. A lot of people, not least strongly driven by a ruthless image culture that goes wild via social media, still do not understand why the perfect life does not exist and is unrealistic. Indeed, the perfect life is imaginary, elusive, unrealistic, let alone desirable. A realization that is barely gaining ground socially because the prevailing visual culture is eager to convince us otherwise.
When a goal is unrealistic – which perfection is – it even becomes potentially dangerous: “In an attempt to take a perfect selfie at a waterfall, five young women fell off a cliff in India. This recent and certainly not the last incident in the addictive search for perfection, in casu the perfect image, also indirectly illustrates the way we often look at Ruud van Empel’s “perfect” work. We are attracted by an idea of perfection but few see the real challenge. Indeed, the ‘technical perfection’ so much talked about in van Empel’s work is not a goal, but a deliberate means. An invitation, following the imaginary, philosophical concept of “perfection,” to look at other philosophical themes within Van Empel’s work in a way that transcends notions of technicality, analog or digital mastery.
Defiant imagination
So, what type of sculptor is up to this? What are we actually looking at when we behold Ruud Van Empel’s “perfect” images? The answer is as simple as it is complex: contrary imagination wrapped in stylistic, visually appealing concepts and ideas. For more than technique, genre or any other categorization we rather too often steal from the Great Register of Art History to say something about a photograph, this photographic work is a philosophical history of themes.
Van Empel turns temporal structures and universal themes inside out and proves how we can make images today from a much-needed trans literacy. Trans literacy understood as an artist’s position, as a conscious choice to adopt a literate and intellectual position within the prevailing visual culture. With and in images. But, as van Empel immediately adds, it is not only the making of these kinds of images that is important today, but also how we as viewers can look at images more critically and, above all, why we should look at images more attentively. In the way in which through this oeuvre, for example, the strongly evolving asymmetry can be deciphered in the relationship between those who look and others who are looked at, it seems as if van Empel has been challenging the ubiquitous visual gaze on its merits for almost four decades now.
All of these image series embody this asymmetry. Photo Sketch (1995- 2003), The Office (1995-1998, 2001), Study for Women – The Naarden Studies (1999-2000) or more recently Souvenir, Souvenir d’intime (2008, 2015) are issues that give van Empel’s oeuvre that special, philosophical temperament.
Complemented by van Empel’s views on themes that have been subject to seismic shifts in recent decades that are surfacing all over the world and, consequently, in the inseparable visual culture. We see those shifts in image series when van Empel clearly reflects on notions of cultural appropriation (Still Life, 2014-2015, 2017) or perfection versus imperfection (Theatre, 2010-2013). But also about nature as an undeniably political fact (Voyage Pittoresque, 2016-2019 and Floresta, Floresta Negra, 2018), a digital world that more than ever eludes the analog world (Unititled, Study in Green, 2003-2004), the artist who archives to forget (Generation, Wonder, Club, 2010-2011), molding the notion of beauty into a disturbing yet effective visual attack strategy in the face of narrow-minded notions (Collage, 2017) or abstract landscapes (Pollution, 2022) in which absolute freedom of expression manifests itself as a unique, slightly rebellious signature. They are reflections all contained in this body of work. Those who look back on this time, say fifty years from now, may find in van Empel a man of honor who perfectly captures the moral epoch in his oeuvre.
Moral rearmament
Ruud van Empel takes a challenging approach in every series. Never non-committal, but extremely thoughtful and usually on the basis of a playing field that repeatedly confronts you with a number of confrontational facts forces you to face a number of facts. In recent years, for example, World (2005-2008, 2010, 2017) received a lot of attention. Within the Christian tradition, the white child is a form of standard iconography to represent innocence. From the idea that black children are just as innocent as white children, Van Empel has visually redefined the concept regarding guilt and innocence.
World, which deals with black innocence, was already an unmistakable statement in 2005 that has lost nothing of its topicality to this day. On the contrary. In the wake of the worldwide events surrounding the death of George Floyd in 2020, that same black skin has become a political statement for many viewers. To many, what van Empel does in World is a form of gratuitous cynicism, but nothing could be further from the truth. Cynicism is a wry joke that dare not face the truth. Van Empel thinks differently. He is more human, more engaged and more sincere. He is, including with a statement like World, ahead of his time. Far away from any kind of cynicism. It brings me to a stimulating slogan: ‘The visual language of Ruud van Empel offers the moral rearmament that our visual culture needs’! Free of pomposity, populism and leaden moralism, but with a finely tuned sight towards people and their environment. A view that with Van Empel is characterized by reason and compassion and consciously reveals itself as a necessary plea for a new humanism. A humanism that recognizes the facts; we are improving overall, but at the same time also a humanism that fully realizes that we as humanity are firmly under pressure. Not least because of the prevailing skepticism and broad-based demagoguery that undermines confidence in scientific, inclusive and, above all, reasonable thinking. In Ruud van Empel’s work, it produces a form of magical thinking, a thinking around what is possible. For if we wish to continue to describe visual culture effectively as an expression of human expression, as well as communication between people, then Ruud van Empel’s oeuvre is an offer you can’t refuse.
In a quasi-uniform visual culture where everything is customized and personalized, Ruud van Empel’s work presents a beautiful paradox. Like a seismologist who scientifically records the vibrations in our visual culture and at the same time fully realizes that what you see depends not only on the context, your knowledge, your personality or your cultural baggage, but especially on the unpredictable moment. That’s where you make the difference as an artist. The moment when you decide to walk with the herd. Or not. And the latter has been a deliberate and masterful choice for van Empel for decades. Call it Van Empel’s avant-garde, a positively colored philosophy of life and an oeuvre that can be described as the necessary “experimental vanguard. Only in this way can Ruud van Empel carefully portray an image of the era. And meticulousness is far from perfection.
Christoph Ruys, former director of the Photography Museum Antwerpen FoMU
CV
Ruud van Empel
1958 Breda,The Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam
Education
Academy of Fine Arts Sint Joost Breda 1976-1981
Awards
1981 St. Joost prize
1993 Charlotte Köhlerprize
2001 H.N. Werkmanprize
2013 Municipality of Breda Oeuvre-prize
2017 Artist of the Year/American Friends of Museums in Israel-NYC
Solo Exhibitions (selection)
2023 STEDELIJK MUSEUM BREDA
2021 VAN GOGH HOUSE
2020 HANGAR ART CENTRE
2019 MUSEUM BELVEDERE
2017 JACKSON FINE ART
2017 BEETLES + HUXLEY
2016 FLATLAND GALLERY
2015 FOTO ART FESTIVAL
2015 BEETLES + HUXLEY
2015 PHOTO PHNOM PENH
2014 STUX GALLERY
2014 JACKSON FINE ART
2014 FLATLAND GALLERY
2014 NOORDBRABANTS MUSEUM
2013 FOTOGRAFISKA
2013 FoMu, FOTOMUSEUM
2012 MoPA-MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 2011 GRONINGER MUSEUM
2011 STUX GALLERY
2011 FLATLAND GALLERY
2010 NOORDBRABANTS MUSEUM
2010 ART+ ART GALLERY
2010 STUX GALLERY
2009 GALLERY TERRA TOKYO
2009 FLATLAND PARIS
2009 STUX GALLERY
2009 LEICA GALERIE LGP, PRAGUE
2008 CB COLLECTION ROPPONGI
2008 KUNSTVEREIN “TALSTRASSE” e.V.
2007 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2007 STUX GALLERY
2007 GALERIE RABOUAN-MOUSSION
2006 FLATLAND GALLERY
2006 JACKSON FINE ART
2006 STUX GALLERY
2005 NOORD BRABANTS MUSEUM
2005 DSM HOOFDKANTOOR
2004 TZR GALERIE FüR BILDENDE KUNST
2001 GALERIA BERINI
2000 CARTAGENA GALERIA
2000 ENCONTROS DA IMAGEM
1999 CARMEN OBERST KUNSTRAUM
1999 FOTOFORUM-ARMANDO MUSEUM
1999 GRONINGER MUSEUM
1998 TORCH GALLERY
Group Exhibitions (selection)
2021 PHOTO OOSTENDE
2020 GRONINGER MUSEUM 2020NRW-FORUM
2019 NORTON MUSEUM OF ART, W.Palm Beach 2019 MUSEO DEL PAESAGGIO
2018 MoCP Museum of Contemporary Photography 2018 PHOTOBRUSSELS FESTIVAL
2017 NASSAU COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
2017 RIJKSMUSEUM VAN OUDHEDEN
2017 KUNSTHAL KAdE
2017 VICKI MYHREN GALLERY
2017 JOODS HISTORISCH MUSEUM
2016 COLLECTORS VIEW
2016 NRW FORUM
2016 PHOTOFESTIVAL BELA HORIZANTE
2016 PHOTOFESTIVAL ISTANBUL
2016 MoPA-MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 2016 FESTIVAL PORTRAIT(S)
2016 DE VISHAL
2015 UCONN, UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT 2015 MUNSTERLAND FESTIVAL
2014 MUSEUM DR.GUISLAIN
2014 YELLOWSTONE ARTMUSEUM
2013 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2012 MOTI MUSEUM
2011 SEOUL ARTS CENTER
2011 FUNDACAO BIENAL
2011 DANZIGER PROJECTS
2011 MUSEUM DR.GUISLAIN
2011 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2010LUMC
2010 SHAY ARYE GALLERY
2010 KUNSTHALLE DARMSTADT
2010 THE PORTSMOUTH MUSEUM OF FINE ART 2010 GORCUMS MUSEUM
2010 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2009 ANTI-CRISES AHA-KUNSTPROJEKT
2009 21C MUSEUM
2009 ULSAN CULTURE AND ARTS CENTER
2009 HANGARAM DESIGN MUSEUM
2009 THE JOHN AND MABLE RINGLING MUSEUM OF ART 2009 DARMSTäDTER TAGE DER FOTOGRAFIE 2008 MUSEUM KUNST PALAST
2008 ARTI ET AMICITIAE
2008 DES MOINES ART CENTRE
2008 NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART 2008 SCHERINGA MUSEUM VOOR REALISME 2007 THE DAVID WINTON BELL GALLERY
2007 MoPA-MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 2007 BELLEZZA PERICOLOSA
2007 STUX GALLERY
2007 PINCHUK ART CENTER
2007 FOTOFESTIVAL NAARDEN
2007 GALERIE 4, GALERIE FOTOGRAFIE
2007 UNIVERSITY OF IOWA MUSEUM OF ART 2007 DES MOINES ART CENTER
2007 CHELSEA ART MUSEUM
2007 CATHERINE CLARK GALLERY
2006 STUX GALLERY
2006 THE ART OMI INTERNATIONAL ARTS CENTER 2006 HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPY MOSCOW 2006 GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE
2005 FOTO ANTWERPEN 2005
2005 GEM GEMEENTEMUSEUM
2003 PHOTOBIENNALE LIÉGE
2003 SCHERINGA MUSEUM VOOR REALISME 2003 FOTOFESTIVAL NAARDEN
2003 FOTOBIËNNALE ROTTERDAM
2002 UNIVERSITEIT VAN TILBURG, FAXX
2002 KUNSTHAL DE REMISE, SBK
2001 ART-TWENTE
2000 PRIMAVERA PHOTOGRAFICA
1999 FOTOMANIFESTATIE NOORDERLICHT
1998 ARTI ET AMICITIAE
Exhibition Catalogues and books
2020 25 YEARS OF PHOTOWORKS, Hangar/Book 2019 MAKING NATURE, Museum Belvedere/Book 2016 ARCHIVE-1980-2000, Ruud van Empel/Book 2016 SOUVENIR D’ITIME Gallery Catalogue
2015 RUUD VAN EMPEL Gallery Catalogue 2012 SUNDAY CHAPTER/Cahier
2011 PHOTOWORKS 1995-2010/Book 2011 WONDER/Catalogue
2009 PHOTOWORKS 2006-2008/Catalogue 2008 RUUD VAN EMPEL FOTOGRAFIE/Catalogue 2007 PHOTO SKETCH/Book
2007 PHOTO-ARCHIVE/Book
2007 WORLD, MOON & VENUS/Book
2006 WORLD MOON/Catalogue
2005 STUDY IN GREEN/Book
2001 PHOTO-ALBUM#1Photoseries 1996 - 2001/Book 1999 AFFICHE-ONTWERPEN/Catalogue
1998 THE OFFICE/Catalogue
1996 PHOTOGRAPHICS/Book
Collections (selection) USA
The Alturas Foundation, Chaney Collection
Des Moines Art Center George Eastman House Christian Louboutin
Jeff Morr Collection Maxine Taupin
MoPA Museum of Photographic Arts Nerman Museum
Pier 24 Photography
RCB (Royal Canadian Bank) in America Stephane Janssen Collection
The Netherlands
APG Collectie
Stedelijk Museum Breda
Caldic Collection
Collectie Erasmus Universiteit,
Collection Rabobank Groningen e.o. Collection Rabobank West-Flakkee, Collection Rabobank Midden Twente
DSM Art-Collection
DELA Kunstcollection
Eneco Energie
Flatland Foundation
Groninger Museum
Joods Historisch Museum
Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid
ING Real Estate Photography Collection
Isala Klinieken
Museum Het Valkhof,
Museum Voorlinden
Noordbrabants Museum
RIJKS Museum
The Essential Collection Rabobank Nederland The Hoboken Photo-Collection
The Netherlands Ministery of Foreign Affairs Vu MC Collection,
United Kingdom
Arad Collection
C-Photo Collection
David Roberts Collection
The Franks-Suss Collection
Sir Elton John Photography Collection Germany
Teutloff Photo + Video Collection
Austria
Generali Foundation
France
FNAC Collection
Switzerland
Catlin Collection
Spain
Colección Juan Redón
Fundación N.M.A.C.
Israel
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Japan
CB Collection
1958 Breda,The Netherlands, lives and works in Amsterdam
Education
Academy of Fine Arts Sint Joost Breda 1976-1981
Awards
1981 St. Joost prize
1993 Charlotte Köhlerprize
2001 H.N. Werkmanprize
2013 Municipality of Breda Oeuvre-prize
2017 Artist of the Year/American Friends of Museums in Israel-NYC
Solo Exhibitions (selection)
2023 STEDELIJK MUSEUM BREDA
2021 VAN GOGH HOUSE
2020 HANGAR ART CENTRE
2019 MUSEUM BELVEDERE
2017 JACKSON FINE ART
2017 BEETLES + HUXLEY
2016 FLATLAND GALLERY
2015 FOTO ART FESTIVAL
2015 BEETLES + HUXLEY
2015 PHOTO PHNOM PENH
2014 STUX GALLERY
2014 JACKSON FINE ART
2014 FLATLAND GALLERY
2014 NOORDBRABANTS MUSEUM
2013 FOTOGRAFISKA
2013 FoMu, FOTOMUSEUM
2012 MoPA-MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 2011 GRONINGER MUSEUM
2011 STUX GALLERY
2011 FLATLAND GALLERY
2010 NOORDBRABANTS MUSEUM
2010 ART+ ART GALLERY
2010 STUX GALLERY
2009 GALLERY TERRA TOKYO
2009 FLATLAND PARIS
2009 STUX GALLERY
2009 LEICA GALERIE LGP, PRAGUE
2008 CB COLLECTION ROPPONGI
2008 KUNSTVEREIN “TALSTRASSE” e.V.
2007 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2007 STUX GALLERY
2007 GALERIE RABOUAN-MOUSSION
2006 FLATLAND GALLERY
2006 JACKSON FINE ART
2006 STUX GALLERY
2005 NOORD BRABANTS MUSEUM
2005 DSM HOOFDKANTOOR
2004 TZR GALERIE FüR BILDENDE KUNST
2001 GALERIA BERINI
2000 CARTAGENA GALERIA
2000 ENCONTROS DA IMAGEM
1999 CARMEN OBERST KUNSTRAUM
1999 FOTOFORUM-ARMANDO MUSEUM
1999 GRONINGER MUSEUM
1998 TORCH GALLERY
Group Exhibitions (selection)
2021 PHOTO OOSTENDE
2020 GRONINGER MUSEUM 2020NRW-FORUM
2019 NORTON MUSEUM OF ART, W.Palm Beach 2019 MUSEO DEL PAESAGGIO
2018 MoCP Museum of Contemporary Photography 2018 PHOTOBRUSSELS FESTIVAL
2017 NASSAU COUNTY MUSEUM OF ART
2017 RIJKSMUSEUM VAN OUDHEDEN
2017 KUNSTHAL KAdE
2017 VICKI MYHREN GALLERY
2017 JOODS HISTORISCH MUSEUM
2016 COLLECTORS VIEW
2016 NRW FORUM
2016 PHOTOFESTIVAL BELA HORIZANTE
2016 PHOTOFESTIVAL ISTANBUL
2016 MoPA-MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 2016 FESTIVAL PORTRAIT(S)
2016 DE VISHAL
2015 UCONN, UNIVERSITY OF CONNECTICUT 2015 MUNSTERLAND FESTIVAL
2014 MUSEUM DR.GUISLAIN
2014 YELLOWSTONE ARTMUSEUM
2013 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2012 MOTI MUSEUM
2011 SEOUL ARTS CENTER
2011 FUNDACAO BIENAL
2011 DANZIGER PROJECTS
2011 MUSEUM DR.GUISLAIN
2011 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2010LUMC
2010 SHAY ARYE GALLERY
2010 KUNSTHALLE DARMSTADT
2010 THE PORTSMOUTH MUSEUM OF FINE ART 2010 GORCUMS MUSEUM
2010 MUSEUM HET VALKHOF
2009 ANTI-CRISES AHA-KUNSTPROJEKT
2009 21C MUSEUM
2009 ULSAN CULTURE AND ARTS CENTER
2009 HANGARAM DESIGN MUSEUM
2009 THE JOHN AND MABLE RINGLING MUSEUM OF ART 2009 DARMSTäDTER TAGE DER FOTOGRAFIE 2008 MUSEUM KUNST PALAST
2008 ARTI ET AMICITIAE
2008 DES MOINES ART CENTRE
2008 NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM OF ART 2008 SCHERINGA MUSEUM VOOR REALISME 2007 THE DAVID WINTON BELL GALLERY
2007 MoPA-MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS 2007 BELLEZZA PERICOLOSA
2007 STUX GALLERY
2007 PINCHUK ART CENTER
2007 FOTOFESTIVAL NAARDEN
2007 GALERIE 4, GALERIE FOTOGRAFIE
2007 UNIVERSITY OF IOWA MUSEUM OF ART 2007 DES MOINES ART CENTER
2007 CHELSEA ART MUSEUM
2007 CATHERINE CLARK GALLERY
2006 STUX GALLERY
2006 THE ART OMI INTERNATIONAL ARTS CENTER 2006 HOUSE OF PHOTOGRAPY MOSCOW 2006 GEORGE EASTMAN HOUSE
2005 FOTO ANTWERPEN 2005
2005 GEM GEMEENTEMUSEUM
2003 PHOTOBIENNALE LIÉGE
2003 SCHERINGA MUSEUM VOOR REALISME 2003 FOTOFESTIVAL NAARDEN
2003 FOTOBIËNNALE ROTTERDAM
2002 UNIVERSITEIT VAN TILBURG, FAXX
2002 KUNSTHAL DE REMISE, SBK
2001 ART-TWENTE
2000 PRIMAVERA PHOTOGRAFICA
1999 FOTOMANIFESTATIE NOORDERLICHT
1998 ARTI ET AMICITIAE
Exhibition Catalogues and books
2020 25 YEARS OF PHOTOWORKS, Hangar/Book 2019 MAKING NATURE, Museum Belvedere/Book 2016 ARCHIVE-1980-2000, Ruud van Empel/Book 2016 SOUVENIR D’ITIME Gallery Catalogue
2015 RUUD VAN EMPEL Gallery Catalogue 2012 SUNDAY CHAPTER/Cahier
2011 PHOTOWORKS 1995-2010/Book 2011 WONDER/Catalogue
2009 PHOTOWORKS 2006-2008/Catalogue 2008 RUUD VAN EMPEL FOTOGRAFIE/Catalogue 2007 PHOTO SKETCH/Book
2007 PHOTO-ARCHIVE/Book
2007 WORLD, MOON & VENUS/Book
2006 WORLD MOON/Catalogue
2005 STUDY IN GREEN/Book
2001 PHOTO-ALBUM#1Photoseries 1996 - 2001/Book 1999 AFFICHE-ONTWERPEN/Catalogue
1998 THE OFFICE/Catalogue
1996 PHOTOGRAPHICS/Book
Collections (selection) USA
The Alturas Foundation, Chaney Collection
Des Moines Art Center George Eastman House Christian Louboutin
Jeff Morr Collection Maxine Taupin
MoPA Museum of Photographic Arts Nerman Museum
Pier 24 Photography
RCB (Royal Canadian Bank) in America Stephane Janssen Collection
The Netherlands
APG Collectie
Stedelijk Museum Breda
Caldic Collection
Collectie Erasmus Universiteit,
Collection Rabobank Groningen e.o. Collection Rabobank West-Flakkee, Collection Rabobank Midden Twente
DSM Art-Collection
DELA Kunstcollection
Eneco Energie
Flatland Foundation
Groninger Museum
Joods Historisch Museum
Instituut voor Beeld en Geluid
ING Real Estate Photography Collection
Isala Klinieken
Museum Het Valkhof,
Museum Voorlinden
Noordbrabants Museum
RIJKS Museum
The Essential Collection Rabobank Nederland The Hoboken Photo-Collection
The Netherlands Ministery of Foreign Affairs Vu MC Collection,
United Kingdom
Arad Collection
C-Photo Collection
David Roberts Collection
The Franks-Suss Collection
Sir Elton John Photography Collection Germany
Teutloff Photo + Video Collection
Austria
Generali Foundation
France
FNAC Collection
Switzerland
Catlin Collection
Spain
Colección Juan Redón
Fundación N.M.A.C.
Israel
Tel Aviv Museum of Art
Japan
CB Collection
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