Ruud van Empel (b. 1958) is one of the most innovative contemporary photographers working today. Van Empel’s pioneering techniques have completely changed the face of digital photography. Using a vast library of digital body parts, fabrics and foliage, van Empel creates dream-like photographic utopias, where nothing is exactly as it seems. Ruud van Empel is represented in the United Kingdom by Huxley-Parlour Gallery.
Using a vast library of digital body parts, fabrics and foliage, van Empel creates a range of dream-like photographic utopias, where nothing is exactly as it seems. Each of his figures is a hybrid, resulting from his painstaking synthesis of hundreds of diverse fragments taken from his own photography: eyes, noses and lips are collaged together to create the entirely new human forms that inhabit his images. The process is painstaking, as a single work can take up to three months to complete. The results are often an uncanny synthesis of the alluring and the unsettling. His methods engage with questions of identity, truth and artificiality in an age where digital simulation is ubiquitous.
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