Jasper de Beijer and Asya Geisberg discuss the artist's latest photography series "The Admiral's Headache", on view at the gallery through May 15, 2021. Directly from his studio in Amsterdam, De Beijer shows examples of his paper models and background material, and explains his ideas, research, and process behind the series.
The photographs in "The Admiral's Headache" reference 18th-century hand-colored engravings. From a distance, these photographs look like seamless colonial paintings, but up close the tell-tale clues of the cut paper reveal themselves. The new series expands on the artist's familiar themes of Dutch colonialism and the way that the media romanticizes, simplifies and conflates history and cultural attitudes.