Jasper de Beijer
De Beijer combines photography digital sketching, 3D modeling, and sculpture to respond to how the media and society still operate on romanticized imperialist clichés. Every object in this series is first designed in a game-model software, and is then printed as a flat 2D blueprint cut out and folded, and finally reconfigured as 3D paper miniatures on a scale-model landscape in the studio to be photographed.
He chooses subjects for their strong visual mythology, and uses visual databases such as postcards, newspapers, or commercial photography to analyze the media detritus of historical moments. After careful research and trips to the place of his focus, he creates and photographs largescale models made of drawn material and constructed bodies, environments, and ephemera, lending the resulting images a dreamlike quality. Using body casts, studio lighting, and both hand-drawn and scanned or manipulated imagery, de Beijer warps the divide between drawing, photography, and sculpture. In creating these scenes de Beijer aims to engage the ways we understand images of historical significance.
The Admiral’s Headache is his newest series of photographic works. Similar to previous series, this new work expands on the artist’s familiar themes over the last twenty years working with Dutch colonialism and the history of slavery.
De Beijer attended the Amsterdam Hogeschool voor de Kunsten, and the Hogeschool voor de Kunsten Utrecht. He has exhibited widely throughout Europe and the United States and is a recipient of the 2020 Agnes van den Brandeler Museum Prize. He is part of a large number of collections, including The Bank of America Collection, Collection Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, and the Rabo Art Collection, Utrecht. His work has been reviewed by Het Parool, Vice Magazine, The New York Observer, Artnet News, and Time Out New York, among others.