Paul Kooiker: eggs and rarities

Abstract

This ambitious but utopian project by Dutch photographer Paul Kooiker reads like a sampler of genres: landscape, nude, still life, and so on. To achieve this, he often employs clichés reminiscent of the propaganda of travel brochures or religious and political rhetoric in the media. Kooiker allows the personal to creep into his work in this 'encyclopaedia of life': a collection of 164 images in which intimate private photographs break through the seemingly objective approach, allowing public and private space to bleed into each other. The result is a large, single work wherein the complexities of things converge, from the medium of photography to life and death, and to the artist himself. ---- Exhibition: FOMU, Photography Museum, Antwerp, Belgium (29.06.-07.10.2018).