Edwin Zwakman studied at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, the Städelschule Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. As well as working as an artist, he currently lectures in Photography at the University of Derby (United Kingdom).
His artistic output draws on two main tools: photography and site-specific interventions in which photographs often play a key role. His goal is to analyse around images to explain how we perceive them, how they work and how they can manipulate our thoughts. He primarily takes large photos with landscapes, places or objects present in Dutch everyday life. However, they are not real but rather models of buildings, back yards and landscapes built by Zwakman in his studio, which he then photographs against painted backgrounds. The models are not exact copies of anything. He makes them with hardly any details using a mental image, from memory of one of his visual experiences. They are therefore a sort of visual summary which, however, the viewer reads, recognises and recalls. Thus, the artist shows that the viewer’s previous knowledge determines what they see in the photograph. On the other hand, the process of constructing and recreating landscapes in his work also alludes to the intense control of the Dutch landscape, that would be largely flooded if it were not for human intervention.
Recurrent features of his site-specific projects include on the one hand holes in the ground and bulldozers as a metaphor of the fall and the process of transformation; and on the other hand montages of fictitious operations by the United Nations, where he uses different types of white vehicles with the UN acronym as an ironic presentation of how images work to serve the media when reporting certain events with social significance.
Zwakman has staged solo show at venues including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1997); the l Centraal Museum (Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2002); the Stedelijk Museum (Schiedam, the Netherlands, 2003); the Theater in Motion (Beijing, 2009); and the OCT Art Museum (Shanghai, 2011). He has taken part in group exhibitions at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris, 2006) and the Helga de Alvear Foundation Visual Arts Centre (Cáceres, 2014), among others. His work was also shown at the Dutch Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale.
Edwin Zwakman studied at the Willem de Kooning Academie in Rotterdam, the Städelschule Academy of Fine Arts in Frankfurt and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. As well as working as an artist, he currently lectures in Photography at the University of Derby (United Kingdom).
His artistic output draws on two main tools: photography and site-specific interventions in which photographs often play a key role. His goal is to analyse around images to explain how we perceive them, how they work and how they can manipulate our thoughts. He primarily takes large photos with landscapes, places or objects present in Dutch everyday life. However, they are not real but rather models of buildings, back yards and landscapes built by Zwakman in his studio, which he then photographs against painted backgrounds. The models are not exact copies of anything. He makes them with hardly any details using a mental image, from memory of one of his visual experiences. They are therefore a sort of visual summary which, however, the viewer reads, recognises and recalls. Thus, the artist shows that the viewer’s previous knowledge determines what they see in the photograph. On the other hand, the process of constructing and recreating landscapes in his work also alludes to the intense control of the Dutch landscape, that would be largely flooded if it were not for human intervention.
Recurrent features of his site-specific projects include on the one hand holes in the ground and bulldozers as a metaphor of the fall and the process of transformation; and on the other hand montages of fictitious operations by the United Nations, where he uses different types of white vehicles with the UN acronym as an ironic presentation of how images work to serve the media when reporting certain events with social significance.
Zwakman has staged solo show at venues including the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam, 1997); the l Centraal Museum (Utrecht, the Netherlands, 2002); the Stedelijk Museum (Schiedam, the Netherlands, 2003); the Theater in Motion (Beijing, 2009); and the OCT Art Museum (Shanghai, 2011). He has taken part in group exhibitions at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (Paris, 2006) and the Helga de Alvear Foundation Visual Arts Centre (Cáceres, 2014), among others. His work was also shown at the Dutch Pavilion at the 2001 Venice Biennale.