Jan theun van rees

Jan Theun van Rees is an experienced photographer who holds a life-long fascination for spatial representation on a flat picture plane. After documenting buildings for over a decade, his photographs gradually shifted to his personal perception of spaces. Jan Theun’s work has been (inter)nationally acquired by private parties as well as museum collections. 

More about the artist

With his art, Jan Theun van Rees focuses on the appearance of space as an image, the perception of that (visualised) space in relation to the space that surrounds us. The representation of a space on the flat surface of the picture plane is always an interpretation of a certain place, even if the site is completely fictitious and exists only as an image. For more than a decade he has documented interiors with a preference for “unsightly spaces” that usually go unnoticed. For example, he has photographed hidden ('rest') spaces in striking buildings in Chicago, but also the many dismantled theatres and museums that underwent large-scale renovations in Amsterdam. Through his photographs he tries to visualise the specific qualities of those spaces. “Camera Lucida” is the catch-all term for all my artistic projects that try to visualise a connection between (interior) spaces and the outside world through incoming light.

From 2015, the focus shifts from the space to the experience of that space. He intervenes in the space, manipulates the incoming light, to emphasise the spatial qualities he experiences. These interventions have become essential to his current practice. He constructs his own spaces, his own versions of a new, not yet existing reality. A certain spatial quality is visualised by constructing a space with the sole purpose to photograph the result. 

Such a building process - constructing a space that he has not seen before - is intuitive. 

CV