Maarten Rots (1982) graduated from the audio-visual department VAV of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 2010. He uses reality as a source for his photographic and video works, without staging situations. Determined that beauty can be found anywhere, he utilizes the city as a source of moments and situations to capture with his camera. His work is characterized by a degree of abstraction in which architecture plays an important role, and his love for graphic shapes often shows in his compositions.

The photographs that Rots will present at QLICK Editions during This Art Fair are a part of the ‘This Side Up’ exhibition. They are the result of his fascination for the abstract qualities of the play between light, shadow and architecture, with properties such as transparency, texture and reflection as important ingredients. Many of these pictures have a painterly quality, emphasized even more by the prints on Hahnemühle German Etching paper.

Maarten Rots about his work:

“I have a strong need to see and capture the world around me. I search for the surreal beauty in reality that can only exist when I push the shutter release button. With that push of the button I have given it a place to exist in the world.

 My photographic work always starts by wandering around, roaming the streets with my camera without a destination in mind. By using reflections and transparency, I capture multiple layers in a single exposure to construct an abstract and textured representation of reality. I love to play with shapes and lines that I find around me in architectural elements in urban surroundings; they are the building blocks for my compositions. Their original meaning and context comes secondary — it’s their form, their silhouette, that attracts me. The reflective surfaces that I often use to capture these compositions are generally textured by the weather; I really like how this blurs the line between photograph and drawing / painting.”