Bas Princen
Car Beach, 2001
C-Print, edition 5/20
Image Size: 13 3/8 x 16 3/4 inches | 34 x 48.9 cm
Edition of 20 + 4 AP
Signed and numbered by the artistSeries 'Artificial Arcadia'
Framed
Car Beach is part of Dutch photographer Bas Princen's Artificial Arcadia series. In this series the artist is concerned with the ways in which people spend their leisure time in "landscapes" whose original purpose is completely different from how they are being utilized, and, as the exhibition curators note, "at first glance, seem to offer no reason to do so." This limited-edition photograph was produced to coincide with the exhibition Nature as Artifice: New Dutch Landscape in Photography and Video Art, on view at Aperture Gallery on the occasion of the four-hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Henry Hudson to New York Harbor aboard the Dutch vessel Halve Maen.
In Car Beach, we see a shallow lagoon that has developed near the harbor in Rotterdam due to an industrial land extension that has changed the water currents. As a result, the Royal Dutch Meteorological Institute issues wind alerts for kite surfing via SMS messages. For this image, Princen set out with his large-format field camera to capture sporting enthusiasts experiencing the landscape in a way that has nothing to do with its natural state or beauty.
In 2004, Princen, who studied design, published forty-three of the photographs from this series in the book, Artificial Arcadia, further reflecting on the artificiality of the Dutch landscape.
Bas Prinsen 'Car Beach'
2017
Corners: MANIERA 11 & 01: Trix + Robert Haussmann & OFFICE Kersten Geers David Van Severen, MANIERA
2016
OFFICE Kersten Geers & David Van Severen: Everything Architecture, Centre for Fine Arts (BOZAR)
Trained as an architect, Bas Princen takes clever photographs of the absurd, surprising ways in which urban development meets nature. With his keen understanding of how buildings are constructed and how the environment is altered in the process, Princen seeks out sites where the boundaries between the natural and man-made are obscured, as he explains: “I go out to find photographs [. . .] in which the artificial and the natural take each other’s forms and in which one is unable to see if things are being constructed or destroyed.” In his Valley (China) (2008), for example, he photographs high-rise apartments built at the edges of a rocky valley. Flush against the rock and with similar patterning on their façades, the buildings look like a continuation of the rock itself.
