Helena Almeida: 'Seduzir' [To Seduce, 2002] (detail)

Collection

Pond [Pond]

Image caption
EDWIN ZWAKMAN

Pond [Pond]

  • 2013
  • Chromogenic print fixed to methacrylate and mounted on Dibond
  • 130 x 123,4 cm
  • Cat. F_167
  • Acquired in 2014
By:
Isabel Tejeda

Pond (2013) is part of a photographic series by the Dutch artist entitled Reality is not a Place. The series – consisting of six photos (Pond, Space, Dyke II, Mirror.Cart, Group and Early Light) each of which is an edition of 5 – brings together architectural and civil engineering spaces, dwellings, arterial roads, etc., sometimes as interiors and sometimes as disturbing landscapes. In the case of Pond, Edwin Zwakman offers an unusual situation: an imposing yellow bulldozer looms up over the water in a lake surrounded by green, leafy vegetation. Cranes have repeatedly appeared in his work ever since Museum (1991) and Suburb (1996), and their meaning is rather enigmatic and ambiguous. It initially seems that the artist works from the perspective of documentary photography, but a second glance shows that Zwakman photographs scale models that he makes in his studio. These are scenarios that are not real, but could be so, or which at least imitate the real in detail. He thus explores the relationship between reality and photography, on the understanding that the landscape itself is a construct.

Isabel Tejeda

 
By:
Isabel Tejeda
Edwin Zwakman
The Hague 1969

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.

Isabel Tejeda

 
 
Vv.Aa. Colección Banco de España. Catálogo razonado, Madrid, Banco de España, 2019, vol. 3.