RUTH VAN BEEK
Saturday, April 10, 2021 01:00pm PST
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ABOUT THE PROGRAM
PhotoAlliance is delighted to welcome back photographer Ruth Van Beek for an online lecture and presentation of her unique practice and current work. In December 2016, Ruth Van Beek gave a lecture with PhotoAlliance introducing her wonderfully enigmatic collages, and we are looking forward to catching up with her again, this time via Zoom from her studio in the Netherlands.
Ruth Van Beek is widely admired for her inventive and enchanting photographic collages, in which oddly endearing abstract forms take on a life-like presence. Her works on paper combine fragments of painted color washes and cut-outs with images from the artist’s collection of printed archival materials. With skill and playful intuition, Van Beek creates a world of anthropomorphic abstractions that teeter between the toylike and monstrous, enlivened with a joyful use of color and careful attention to how conventions of photographic rendering can blend fantasy and reality.
For the lecture with PhotoAlliance, Van Beek will share selections from several recent series of work, including The Nursery, exhibited earlier this year at the Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam. In this series, Van Beek embodied her constructed figures through careful study of dolls and pictures of dolls. Mining her growing personal archive of doll imagery for inspiration, she looked for similarities in construction, size and appearance while also tapping into how metaphor, psychology, and the imagination are implicated in doll play. The Nursery builds upon Van Beek’s previous series, How To Do The Flowers, inspired by images the artist found in an online archive: the Seed and Nursery Catalogs Collection, itself part of an extensive Archive of Biodiversity. How To Do The Flowers is an absurdist manual of strange instructions and unfinished collages which address the physicality and animation of lifeless matter that has played an increasingly important role in her work.
We invite you to join us for this opportunity to spend some time with Ruth Van Beek, to catch up with her work and practice over the last few years, and to share the inspiration in her highly creative approach to the materials of photography.
About Ruth Van Beek
Ruth Van Beek’s work has been shown internationally at the likes of FOMU (BE); ETAL Gallery, (US); The Ravestijn Gallery (NL); Les Rencontres d’Arles (FR); Flowers Gallery (UK) and Fraenkel Gallery (US) amongst others. Her work has been featured in magazines such as Centrefold Magazine, Foam Magazine, IMA Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, The Aperture Photobook Review, Financial Times, Elephant Magazine and The New York Times.
She has published numerous artist books including The Arrangement (2013) which was shortlisted for the Aperture Photobook of the Year Award in 2014, and How To Do The Flowers (2018), co-published by Art Paper Editions (BE) and Dashwood Books (US) to widespread acclaim. Her most recent book, Eldorado, made in collaboration with Willem Van Zoetendaal and published by Van Zoetendaal Publishers, is available for purchase HERE.
For more information and to inquire about Ruth Van Beek’s original works, please contact the Ravestijn Gallery:
Westerdok 824
1013 BV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
T: +31 (0)20 530 6005
E: info@theravestijngallery.com
www.theravestijngallery.com
2021 INTERNATIONAL Lecture Series
For close to two decades, PhotoAlliance has offered wonderful lectures to the Bay Area community, highlighting well-known and celebrated photographers as well as introducing remarkable emerging artists from our community. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the cancellation of most of our 2020 programs. To make a silver lining of this shutdown period we are launching an International Lecture Series for spring 2021. Using the new normal of online programming, each of the artists in our spring series will be “beaming in” from locations throughout the world.
The PhotoAlliance 2021 International Lecture Series is presented in partnership with the San Francisco Art Institute and the San Francisco Artists Alumni.
