After a wonderful opening my new solo exhibition ‘Zeeland’ is on show in Galerie Wouter van Leeuwen, Hazenstraat 26, Amsterdam. You can visit the gallery from Thursday to Saturday, 13.00 – 18.00. I will be there to welcome you on a wednesday 30 October, from 12.00 – 17.00. Look at my instagram page for updates of extra opening hours. You can visit the exhibition until Saturday 7 December.
About the Exhibition
It’s March 2020. The era of the coronavirus. Everyone must stay inside and only a few are allowed to go out. At that very moment Zeeland appears in sight of Jeroen Hofman. It’s an empty province and at the same time it’s aesthetic and harsh, he notices. The photographer rents a few holiday houses in the swampy province, always in different places. He takes a close look at the landscapes that slowly and almost unnoticed awake after the pandemic silence. Meanwhile, the unruly nature of what he sees intrigues him more and more. He notices contrasts everywhere: the silence of salt marshes and beaches and in the distance the industry of Terneuzen and Vlissingen. The landscapes are full of character. Wide, empty, untouched and always with tiny signs of human presence in the background. Sometimes it’s blurred and sometimes sharply defined. The Zeeland Bridge, heavy industry, windmills, Neeltje Jans and impressive churches from times long past. Landscapes with nature and tourism at an appropriate distance from each other, but intimately entwined. And always with the presence of water meandering in between everywhere.
Again and again the photographer returns to these landscapes of Zeeland, descending ever deeper into the flat land by hovering above it like a bird of prey. He starts to see more and more sharply and with ever more layers. The small differences between fog and a grey sky, between spring and summer and between a fresh westerly wind and winter freezing cold. He separates the temporal drama in a mass of clouds from the timeless state he intends to capture. He has the gaze of an old master. Just as Ruisdael chose an incidence of light, like Koninck catched a cloth field and like Vermeer took a mysterious higher position to see what we see. And all this in a composition that Mondrian might have chosen. Hofman waits, high in a cherry picker, for that one thing to happen. In the corner of his eye, it looms next to the Drowned Land of Saeftinghe with the nuclear power station of Doel, the ports of Antwerp and the Scheldt in the distance. Hofman captures Zeeland in photography and film, frozen moments, and movements in a slow procession of colours.
