opening june 8th, 5-7.30pm

Upstream Gallery presents a series of short exhibitions by young and upcoming artists in the Private Viewing Space. In conjunction with openings in our main gallery, we open momentary presentations of young artists in this 17th century room.

Upstream Gallery proudly presents See the light, the first solo presentation by Fabian Landewee.

In this body of work, the artist visually explores concepts of seeing, looking, perception and visibility. Turning his lens onto the places where images are produced, he aims to deconstruct the idea of photography. Landewee takes the viewer behind the scenes of image-making, showing us photographers capturing the runway during fashion week; the LEDs that illuminate Rio de Janeiro’s famous statue of Christ the Redeemer or the eye testing equipment at an optician’s exam room. The relation between desire and the photographic medium is a recurring theme.

Following his increasing interest in the physical nature of photographs as objects, Landewee started to integrate sculpture in his practice. In Headlight, the industrial finish of the seductive object – a pars pro toto for a car as a highly desirable commodity – contrasts starkly with the earthly, unfired clay, in which the artist’s fingerprints are still visible. The sculpture results from a further investigation into themes that were already present in Landewee’s earlier works in photography, such as reflection, material desire, illumination, object fetishism and the photographic body.

Fabian Landewee is a visual artist based in Amsterdam. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Maastricht and recently received a master of arts degree in Media Design (Lens-based media) at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. His practice focuses on the image as object and photographic production. Landewee works with a comprehensive archive of images. Disregarding any hierarchy between new, older and found images, he creates new constellations through association. In these new contexts, visual fragments acquire a new meaning.