Hans van Wingerden
In my current conceptual work, image or stylistic features play a subordinate role. After postmodernism, I consider such concepts obsolete. Image has become a commonplace of mass culture, as was already the case back then. Only by providing an image with new codes or context can it escape this.
I (un)borrow images and recompose them. These are representations of concepts that regularly appear in our contemporary visual world, but through manipulation, contextual alienation, and associative reference, yield a new visual meaning. I usually create diptych paintings. This is to express the interplay between two extremes of form, execution, and meaning. These days, the term "reversal of polarities" is applicable.
Since 1995, I have been creating conceptual work on various topics, addressing a critical perspective on human functioning. Besides the technical integration, it also inspired me to shape my intellectual objectives. This also includes applications of electronics, LEDs, and neon lights as possibilities for visual expression. The neon usually comes from old factory buildings, many of which I demolished in the 1990s and thus saved from destruction.
It feels good to give it a new life in my work, in a completely different context. In this way, the letter or a series of letters acquires a meaning that breaks free from the purely lithographic aspect it once had. In my current work, this letter, or other lighting effects, is assembled into a complete image.
The substantive meaning can generally be traced back to how I experience the extreme contradictions of our time in my work. The world in which humanity lives is hypocritical and false, making injustice an accepted phenomenon, so that it reflects a complete illusion. I can't separate this from my artistry, because it's my job to use my accentuated visual meanings to provide a focused stimulus to guide consciousness in a certain direction. I must state that the image, or the translation of meaning into the image, is always the primary driving force, along with the conceptual content, in order to be able to depict the image in its uniqueness.
Hans, congratulations on receiving the Premier Artist Prize 2025, a significant accolade that affirms your expansive and multifaceted career. In light of this recognition, how do you view the arc of your practice, not merely as a chronological evolution, but as a constellation of ideas, ruptures, and recurrences? Does this moment of institutional acknowledgment shift your relationship with the past, or does it underscore an enduring necessity to remain untethered from any form of artistic canonization?
Thank you for the appreciation I received from the questioner regarding the 2025 Premier Artist Prize awarded to me. That appreciation is, in itself, a good indication of the value of my oeuvre, but in my view, it is a snapshot of time, a moment in which things come together. It offers no confirmation of the significance of your work, and the vanity you can derive from it is also foreign to me. My oeuvre is a necessary urge to create images that stem primarily from my inner motivations. It is essentially separate from the need for recognition, perhaps because, early in my professional life, I detached myself from a need for validation from the art world, which, after all, is separate from the intrinsic value judgments regarding myself. The former concerns a value judgment based on the determinations of art critics and curators who often help determine the trend of what constitutes high-quality art. I have detached myself from that. The driving forces behind what I want to create and what is meaningful to me are shaped by my spiritual inspirations and not by what the art market assumes to be valuable.
Your transition from photographic realism to geometric abstraction and, eventually, conceptual installation is often described as organic, yet it reveals a persistent questioning of the image’s role in a saturated visual culture. How do you conceptualize the image today as illusion, as artifact, as ideological device, and how does your work attempt to destabilize its perceived authority?
The artist's interpretations, as with everyone, are generally part of the images formed in their lives. They arise from the constant adjustment of one's experience or even from perceived perspectives, a form of manipulation within the range of images of mass culture. This is a conditioned circumstance. It is a vessel, containing an enormous multitude of interpretations and meanings that are addressed in our culture. These images of mass culture have quite quickly left behind the entirely different imagery of modernism. Through the frequent repetitions, distortions, adaptations, and understandings, we have continually arrived at a different status of meanings; this also entails a certain leveling of the image's value. It usually doesn't require investigation or leads to few questions, because people need only experience it. In consciousness, such shifts in perception are also not noticed due to their constantly sliding scale. With this reasoning in mind, contemporary pictorial solutions also appear in a different light, because art has often become mere decoration and doesn't necessarily have a substantive meaning, other than the sole purpose of pleasing.
The pictorial solutions themselves are almost obsolete, because much has already been done, so that only more or less repetitions with some variation still impose themselves on a higher order of art. This can hardly compete with the original pictorial pretension of research from that time. Is that a bad thing? No, they are changes over time. It can be especially useful if we separate the meanings of images from the current era from their original application. Many artists have done this before me, especially by choosing different materials and forms of expression. I see the contemporary visual language of mass culture as a source of inspiration, but only interesting in providing these images with a new or different context. So I use these images and imbue them with new meaning. During the thinking and working process, these images emerge, provided with a layering through which interpretation, social views and existing forms such as hypocrisy, are transformed into new content in a translation.
In your later works, neon light emerges not simply as material, but as a medium laden with historical, industrial, and commercial residues. In pieces like Z-Word and Still Victory, light becomes language, simultaneously seductive and subversive. How do you see the function of illumination within your practice: as revelation, distortion, or both? And how does this complicate traditional hierarchies between form and content?
After rescuing the old neon tubes from their otherwise inevitable demolition, I faced the dilemma of giving the letters, with their completely different origins, a different meaning. Once detached from its literal meaning, the letter no longer has any substance. The creative solution I proposed creates a completely different association, imbuing the neon letter with a new meaning. I combined the electronics I'd previously employed in other works with the neon visual language, creating a reinforcing effect because the neon light represents both an attraction and an image-defining element. A reinforcing appearance alone isn't enough; it must also underscore the conceptual meaning.
Your consistent use of diptychs over the past two decades introduces a visual and conceptual fissure, doubling, dividing, and often destabilizing interpretation. Can you speak to the philosophical or semiotic implications of this structure? Is it an act of resistance against closure, or a formal embodiment of contradiction?
Around 1995, I had already begun creating paintings with a dual appearance, as this could provide a broader palette of conceptual possibilities and painterly interpretations. In my view, the relationship between two objects can illuminate the content differently, making it more prominent. This dualistic concept creates a contrast, or different interpretations, through which the two sides of a substantive position are illuminated, within which the concept is situated. Taking into account my painting skills acquired in the recent past, I see it as a significant expansion of the painterly idiom. I can utilize virtually any processing of material to prioritize the underlying message. This has primarily focused on philosophical themes, but the image's inherent appeal must not be lost in the conceptual context. It is not so much an act of resistance, but rather a developed awareness through which shameful life circumstances sometimes lead to extreme and disastrous consequences.
Works such as Indoctrination Attaché powerfully interrogate systems of power, propaganda, and collective conditioning. In a time when political art is often expected to adopt a declarative tone, your installations instead suggest ambiguity, fragmentation, and subtle subversion. How do you navigate the terrain between political urgency and conceptual restraint, especially in a world increasingly polarized by visual narratives?
The content of my works demonstrates how absurdity has come to define life. A work like " Indoctrination Attaché " represents the normally sealed suitcase with unknown contents, but through its cutout, it offers a contradictory insight into the evil manifestations of humanity. I don't feel the need to create pure declarations with a politicizing purpose. It's about the duality of the message or the layering of the image, which, in combination, places the message in the strongest possible position. I always primarily seek a form that complements each other. The message supports the execution and vice versa. So, it's not so much about polarizing representations, but rather reflections of thought processes and consciousness-determining factors, such as the personal or social consequences of behavioral attitudes, which have evolved into phenomena.
Your practice refuses allegiance to any singular medium: painting, photography, neon, installation, and video coexist without hierarchy. In a post-medium condition, how do you approach material decisions: are they intuitive responses to conceptual necessity, or do you see them as part of a larger strategy of disruption and reframing?
My visual art practice isn't the result of a refusal to conform, a resistance to preconceived societal views, or anything like that. Absolutely not. I knew from the age of 13 that I was going to be an artist. The search that followed determined my choice of the field that appealed to me most. Each medium has its own unique potential. The photography I studied as a minor at the Academy did, however, help shape my understanding of the meaning of the image and its interventions. Later, it turned out that the first step in my artistic career was applicable within photographic realism, the field in which I graduated. This photographic observation has stayed with me, which is why I remain a passionate follower of the snapshot, precisely because it could exist independently of other structural investigations within the painterly idiom. My artistic developments are therefore separate from this.
It seems to me that a constant development was underway, necessary to further develop my understanding of how the possibilities of the painterly palette could lead to exciting visual aspects. I had little connection with predecessors in the stylistic forms I subsequently adopted. My discovery concerned the tensions inherent in all the different types of imagery and meanings employed. Subsequently, I understood that this arsenal of possibilities was necessary to familiarize myself with the interplay of conceptual meanings and to express the painterly translation, so that image and meaning can merge. These are not ongoing rational decisions that underlie this; it is a creative process, a combination of intuitive and intellectual control.
You’ve referenced the erosion of the “cult value” of the image in the age of mass media and reproduction. How does this awareness influence your studio practice? Is your engagement with physicality, whether through salvaged neon, tactile layering, or analog photography, an act of resistance to digital homogenization or a meditation on ephemerality and loss?
Certainly, I believe that the intrusiveness of images that reach us through media and advertising causes a flattening of what the perception of the image could possibly mean, an unstable conception unleashed by the conditioning factors that determine our worldview. It is an observation, a position statement, that many forms of visual aspects have emerged in the present era. In postmodernism, these determinations are already embedded in time, so that new aspects also seek new perspectives. Perhaps I unconsciously tend to engage in a confrontation within the image that is inherent to this era, precisely to escape this flattening. It is not so much a resistance, because the development of all kinds of phenomena cannot be summarized in personal perspectives alone. I therefore consider image manipulation an essential part of the image, but always in the service of its conceptual meaning. I also consider digital usability to be one of the achievements of our time.
Your career spans over four decades, and your oeuvre reflects a rare patience; each stylistic shift arrives not as a rupture, but as the outcome of long gestation. In an era dominated by immediacy and acceleration, what does slowness mean to you as an artist? How does temporality manifest not only in your process but in the conceptual undercurrents of your work?
My development has been shaped by a strong need for personal exploration and partly by how long and how much time I needed to gain a particular insight. That's how our consciousness always works. You could force it, but chances are you'll fall into a trap. Carefully and disciplinedly shaping your oeuvre is also part of your artistic practice. I give free rein to the dictates of my unconscious motivations!
Your photographic works, particularly those produced during travel, capture fleeting moments yet suggest deeper sociocultural resonances. How do you navigate the ethics of observation, especially when working in foreign or politically sensitive contexts? Do you consider these photographs as standalone works or as fragments within a broader conceptual ecosystem?
Photography has many facets, and during my academic years, it was still undervalued as an art form. In my view, the so-called snapshot is very appealing because the image doesn't rely so much on a rational approach, but also accentuates a way of seeing. This was also the case in earlier times, so my approach is quite traditional, although the image always reflects a change over time. I don't apply any image adjustments; at most, frames are cropped slightly. All shots are seen and perceived in this way, and the coincidences are a form of unconscious searching that the eye detects. The selection later determines the quality of the shot. What comes after me is irrelevant to me. It is a determination in time and space, and the later time is not essentially important to the present.
You’ve spoken with refreshing candor about your disinterest in legacy, recognition, or market validation. Yet your work has never shied away from engaging with the structures, historical, political, and economic that define our present. In light of your recent accolade and sustained critical interest, how do you reconcile institutional visibility with your insistence on autonomy? What does it mean, today, to make work that resists commodification while remaining culturally resonant?
In my work, I've often wanted to showcase a social trend or perspective. In my realistic and figurative period, this was easier than in my expressive and abstract period, where the emphasis was on artistic research. After my transition to my conceptual work in 1994, it was again possible to reintroduce my viewpoints through a conceptual approach. Incidentally, the aforementioned connection with the image is of fundamental significance. The layering of image and meaning doesn't immediately abandon the conceptual perspective. I see it as my task to place the image in a context that addresses all sorts of aspects relevant to our time. This could be humor, or rather grimness, a poetic stance, or a hard-hitting confrontation. Every artist is free to choose their own idiom, but I consider a critical stance much more appropriate in this day and age than, for example, someone who creates floral still lifes, although there may be room for it in the art market. In the future, the cards regarding this era will be reshuffled. The autonomy of my artistic existence is not compromised, because I don't consider recognition for my work the ultimate goal. Recognition is a limited concept, and sinking into oblivion can always loom on the horizon. Recognition is based on other grounds, often on a foundation that takes material/realism as its starting point. Perhaps there's a vague resistance to the established art order, even an unconscious one. Whether my work is relevant today is something I leave to others, but I believe it is indeed relevant within contemporary conceptual representation.