"Gray Scale"

(two-part)

gelatin silver print

signed, titled, dated and numbered on label on verso.

No more flowers
The young Dutch artist Jeroen de Rijke is dead

Actually, Jeroen de Rijke just wanted to take a little time off. But he took his camera and computer with him when he last left for Ghana. As an artist, you never know whether there might be a theme, an inspiration, a picture waiting in the distance. Whether the Dutch artist has found something in Africa, we will probably never know: Jeroen de Rijke died, as his gallery owner Daniel Buchholz announced, last week in a Ghanaian provincial hospital from heart failure - at the age of 35. He became internationally known early on, almost a decade ago. Since 1994 de Rijke and the one year older Willem de Rooij formed an artist duo, and already during their joint studies at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Rijksakademie van beeldenden kunsten in Amsterdam their first films Forever And Ever (1995) and Coming Home In Forty Days (1997) were presented in a museum, the latter for instance at Manifesta 2 in Luxembourg in 1998. De Rijke/de Rooij, who initially worked primarily with 16 mm and later 35 mm film material, soon expanded their formal language, increasingly using photography, video, slide projections, but also flower arrangements. Most recently, her Bouquet II - a colourful bouquet illustrating a research text telling the sad life stories of four women - was on display at the major exhibition "Projekt Migration" in Cologne. These were fatefully linked by the 2002 Miss World election, which was moved from Nigeria to Great Britain after religious protests. Indeed, socio-political and social aspects had recently become more prominent in the works of de Rijke/de Rooij, after their earlier films had often dealt with questions of the representation of images and the basic problem of the time in a rather abstract way. The turn to the concrete cinematic plot then marked their most prominent appearance to date: last year, the duo designed the Dutch pavilion at the Venice Biennale with a screening of their 35-minute film Mandarin Ducks, whose plot revolves around classic cultural studies themes such as gender and race. Their last major exhibitions were in 2005 at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Vienna Secession.
(Dirk Peitz, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 15.3.2006)