Paul Kooiker is one of those artists who experiment with the interfaces between photography and other media. Paul Kooiker has for years distinguished himself with work in which photography is, as it were, freed from its traditional parameters. Kooiker can be regarded as an installation artist rather than a photographer “pur sang”. He is never after the perfect photographic image. As a matter of fact, Kooiker’s work always arises during post-production, as he selects and manipulates his images.

The project, Eggs and Rarities is Paul Kooiker’s “encyclopaedia of life” in 164 images. This ambitious and utopian work reads like a sampler of photographic genres: landscape, nude, still life, etc. To achieve this, Kooiker often uses clichés that are reminiscent of the rhetoric of tourist brochures or the religious and political propaganda offered in the media.

Little by little, Kooiker allows the personal to creep into the work. Intimate private photographs break through the filter of the seemingly objective approach, so that public and private space spill over into each other. The result is one large work in which things—the artist himself, the medium of photography, life and death— converge to form a complex.

Paul Kooiker was born in 1964 in Rotterdam, NL. He studied at the Royal Academy of Arts in The Hague and at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam (1990-1992, NL). Kooiker was awarded the Prix-de-Rome Photography in 1996 and the A. Roland Holst Award for his oeuvre in 2009. Kooiker’s work has been featured at numerous solo and group shows in the Netherlands and abroad, with solo displays at such venues as the FOMU Fotomuseum of Antwerp (2018, BE); The Hague Museum of Photography (2014, NL), the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (2009, NL), and the Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam (2006, NL). Work by Paul Kooiker is held in public and private collections internationally.

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