#25: The graduation and master projects

This is a project that I did for my graduation at the arts academy. It was the year after my father had passed away. These were still very much inspired by the work of, for instance, Araki, black and white photography, kind of depicting elements, moments that somehow we're dealing with this with this idea of loss and grief. You can see that a lot of pictures are damaged. That's because they're the vintage prints. It's actually the very old prints that I used back then. For my graduation project.

Then the year after I get graduated, I was asked, I was invited to participate a in a masters of fine art. And that's when I started to doing this work, which I think here you can see the very early attempts of kind of coming to my own personal style. So you already see these elements of surrealism, but also looking at the body as a sculpture.

For instance, this is my own hand. It's just the way that you place your hands and kind of hiding your fingers and your thumb. Behind this part of the hand. I think from a very young age, I was always doing these kind of little tricks with my eyes, these little games like looking left, right? What can I hide? What can I see? And what can I not see? This one is, it's also my own hand, and it looks really weird like a weird shape, but it's just also hiding few of my fingers behind the palm of my hand. Here you can see a very early a reference to the Black Square of Malevich. At the time I was already intrigued by this artwork of Malevich, but I am I wanted to do the reverse make and I shot a lot of white objects at the time.