Ruud van Empel (Dutch, 1958)

Ruud van Empel has been engaged in creating photographic collages since the 1980s, initially for posters and television leaders and later primarily as autonomous work.

From the mid-nineties onward, van Empel devoted all his endeavor to art photography, developing his images in thematic series. Since 2002, he has been working a great deal with nature and, in doing so, he has definitively found his present day characteristic visual language: photographic works with an unbelievable clarity of colour, rich in detail, with intriguing representations, and a fairytale ambience. Children are often featured prominently in his images. Ruud van Empel combines forms on the computer and assembles pictures that deceive our perception. His work balances between reality and perfection. They are magical-realistic images, as it were, a cross between narrative painting and staged photography. This work is from his recent series entitled World, Moon and Venus.(Frank van de Schoor)

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