Jean Bernard Koeman

Visual artist Jean Bernard Koeman (Belgium, 1964) studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the Royal Academy of Visual Arts in Amsterdam. He exhibits in the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada, China and Palestine and is a visiting lecturer for courses in the Netherlands, Switzerland and South Africa. He also advises various organisations and municipalities on cultural policy. From 1998 to 2002 he was director of the Amsterdam artists’ initiative w139.

Koeman’s series Everything Beautiful Is Far Away (2008) consists of photos of landscapes he himself labels raw and empty. It is a selection from an ongoing series of thousands of photos he took during his travels all over the world. His viewers are not presented with idealised ‘pretty pictures’; these photos are rather an attempt to record man’s search for experience. Man alone in nature. Thanks to the barren landscape, man is ultimately obliged to turn his gaze inward.