Crush the new photographic installation by Paul Kooiker Photography

Paul Kooiker - Crush

Paul Kooiker, Crush, 2009, Courtesy Galerie Willem van Zoetendaal
Exhibition 5 September - 22 November 2009

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Alongside Crush, the new photographic installation by Paul Kooiker the museum is showing the 2008 photo series Room Service. The artist Paul Kooiker lets the visitor peer into his installations, but he dictates the distance between the visitor and the work. His work reveals him as a past master in the art of juggling the cliché and the unexpected.

Spectacle
Crush is a series of twenty large black and white photographs (210 x 160 cm). Crush, the new work by Paul Kooiker, follows on from Showground (2004). Once again he uses his studio as the location and photographs nude models. The works create the illusion of being made at a crime scene: hastily taken photographs, edgy, tense. The surroundings seem bleaker and feel like a battlefield deserted in panic or a runway after a well-attended air show. Attributes such as cushions, furniture and a vacuum cleaner are scattered around and models are left to their fate in awkward poses. The photographic works show the moment before the descent of an ominous silence.

Collaboration
Guest curator Willem van Zoetendaal, born in The Hague in 1950, selected the new photographic installation by Paul Kooiker and the photo series Room Service for this exhibition. Willem van Zoetendaal is a gallery owner and the curator of many photographic exhibitions in the Netherlands and abroad. He has worked closely with Paul Kooiker on exhibitions and photo books since 1994. The photo book Crush—the sixth to result from the collaboration between Paul Kooiker and Willem van Zoetendaal—accompanies the exhibition. The earlier volumes are on display in the showcase in the museum shop.

Oeuvre
The artist Paul Kooiker, born in Rotterdam in 1964, won the Prix de Rome in 1996 and this year was awarded the A. Roland Holst Prize for his oeuvre. Kooiker creates obsessive collections of images from his fascination for voyeurism, shame and clichés, which throw the viewer into confusion.