Anouk Kruithof

Anouk Kruithof is a Dutch artist born in 1981 in Dordrecht, the Netherlands, where she graduated from Art College in 2003. Since she attended the artist in residency program Künstlerhaus Bethanien from 2008 till 2009 she has been living in Berlin till she moved to New York in September 2011. At the moment she is based in New York with an O1 (artist) visa, which gives her the opportunity to live and work in the USA for 3 years. Among others she had solo exhibitions at gallery Boetzelaer I Nispen in London, gallery Adler in Frankfurt, Museum het Domein in Sittard NL and FOAM Amsterdam. Her work includes several international groupshows such as Super Positions / The New Wight Biennal at UCLA Los Angeles, The Daegu Photo Biennal in Daegu, Korea, Crossroads at KIT (Kunst Im Tunnel) Düsseldorf, Quickscan #01 at Het Nederlands Fotomuseum and was shown at ACP Sydney, MAMAC Liege, Temporare Kunsthalle Berlin, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, DCC Shanghai en Kunstraum Niederosterreich in Vienna. Among others MOMA library, FOAM, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Museum het Domein are collecting her work. In 2012 she got honoured with an ICP Infinity Award from the International Center for Photography in New York. In 2011 she won the Grand Prix Jury as well as the Photoglobal prize at Hyeres, festival international de mode et de photography. Anouk Kruithof considers photography as a starting point of infinite possibilities. Her method is interdisciplinary and mostly idea based. She inventively explores ideas of the picture plane, the image, and the materiality and physicality of the medium of photography. Her work is at once seductive while simultaneously critically deconstructing this seductiveness. Social inter action such as encounters with strangers, she analyzes, shapes and imagines forming a basis in her practice. She is interested in the inner worlds of people. Visualizing the universal discomfort, which can be seen as the boundaries of the human mind. Basically she is looking for elements, which can’t be seen from outside with a medium: photography, which just shows just the surface of things. It seems like an impossible target and therefore creates resistance, which stretched her practice from photography into -photo, -video, and -spatial installations, social in situ-works, take away ephemera, assemblage, performance and artist-books. Often her temporary installations and interactions with unknown people and space form the basis of her photographs. After she uses her photographs as material, which she transfers across different surfaces and spaces into sculptural forms, minimal installations, and tactile artist-books. Writing is getting more important. She wrote her first published fictional short story A head with wings in an artist-book with the same title. She has been writing for 1000 Words magazine, Wanderingbears, PhotoEye and Photoq. Anouk Kruithof lectured at TATE modern London, Leeds College of Art, Hartford Photography MFA, Officine Fotografische Roma, Deichtorhallen Hamburg and Massachusetts College of Art and Design.