Driessens & Verstappen

Nature as Artifice

New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art

12 Jun 2008
28 Sep 2008

Worldwide, ‘Dutch landscape’ still evokes an immediate mental picture: the picture of the idyllic agrarian landscape that is rooted in the tradition of Dutch landscape painting. However, the Netherlands, like many other countries, has changed radically in its function over the last century, and has thus also altered in its appearance.

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NatureAsArtifice.jpg - Driessens & Verstappen

Affected by a global reordering of production and industry, the agrarian function of the landscape is making way for suburbanisation, recreation, industrial and business parks and infrastructure for transportation. Today it is precisely the planning, the artificial manner in which the Dutch manipulate their landscape and nature in a continual and far-reaching way, for which The Netherlands is internationally famed. Since the end of the 1980s a number of Dutch photographers and filmmakers have been taking exactly this artificial character of the Dutch landscape and nature as their point of departure.
Exhibition with works of Hans Aarsman, Jannes Linders, Wout Berger, Henze Boekhout, Edwin Zwakman, Theo Baart, Cary Markerink, Hans van der Meer, Marnix Goossens, Driessens/Verstappen, Hans Werlemann, Gert Jan Kocken, Bas Princen, Gábor Ösz, Gerco de Ruijter, Frank van der Salm.
curator: Maartje van den Heuvel

publication : Nature as Artifice, NAi Publishers , Rotterdam
authors: Inka Graeve Ingelman, Maartje van den Heuvel, Tracy Metz, Alison Nordström a.o.
design: Reynoud Homan