PNEUMA - Limited Edition of 6 Print

The Dutch Fine Art photographer Mike van Veen was born in Hilversum, where he established the ‘MV²’Art Practice and Studio to create his debut exhibition, ‘HEADSPACE’, featuring images originally captured using an X-ray camera . Inspired by the Dutch painter, sculptor and poet Christiaan Karel Appel, co-founder of the avant-garde movement Cobra and the Swiss surrealist painter H.R Giger, van Veen’s artistic career began as a film-maker. Like the German artist Rebecca Horn, van Veen’s own medical experiences at a young age led directly to the formation of his early art practice (in his case, seeing X-rays of himself following injuries as an active, exploring child). “I became fascinated in X-ray photography and its potential for creating a new aesthetic in figurative, as well as more abstract work, transforming the appearance of the world around me and the visual identity of objects in it”. “As an artistic technology, it is unique and the results are always unpredictable, generating artistic outcomes that are only discovered through the experimental process of exposing objects to different amounts of radiation. Creating sharper and more representational images or more opaque and abstract images, depending on how the process is applied and on the original form (particularly the thickness) of the object being photographed”. Van Veen’s early travels to Afghanistan and Italy, in particular, led him to experience light and colour in ways which he then applied to the initial X-ray images he had made, transforming their subjects’ form and appearance to give them a compeletely new visual identity.