PAN AMSTERDAM 2021

For Bildhalle’s first participation at PAN Amsterdam, the gallery presents a wide selection of excellent photography, with both classical and contemporary works.


Ilona Langbroek’s personal series “Silent Loss” is based on her family history set in the Dutch East Indies. Her work deals with the lost identity of the large number of people who were forced to leave their country after the independence of Indonesia. She invites the viewer to look at this past through a metaphorical representation of memories and fantasies in poetic images. As Zelda Cheatle, a renowned British curator of photography writes: “Ilona Langbroek is the discovery of 2021 for me.”

 

The elegant compositions of Bastiaan Woudt’s masterpieces make you feel as if you are stepping into a modern painting. Light and shadow dance elegantly. You‘ll find a hint of surrealism as the sober shades ask you to see only the essence and awaken every detail. His work is minimalistic yet moves, playing with the beauty of imperfection, inspired by the 50s, 60s and 70s photography.

 

Viewing Casper Faassen’s work is akin to peering through the mists of time. With a studio in Leiden, the birthplace of Rembrandt, the artist takes inspiration from the classical paintings to which he was introduced as a young boy in The Netherlands. Specifically, he approaches the vanitas genre of still-life painting from a new perspective, developing a unique visual language through the combination of photography, paint, and the application of craquelure.

 

After their wedding in 1952, René Groebli and his wife went on honeymoon to Paris. During the visit Groebli shot some photographs which one year later he published as an artist’s book entitled “The Eye of Love”. The U.S. Camera Annual, the most influential American photographic yearbook of the time, wrote in 1955: “The series is a tender photo essay on a photographer’s love for a woman.” It is no surprise that the series launched Groebli’s international career and that one of its photographs, the “Sitting Nude”, became part of the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York.