manipulated portrait photography
Wim Hardeman manipulates photographs dramatically using the computer, creating portraits that seem almost tortured by this treatment. Wim Hardeman mixes photography with painting by a technique she calls 'tintography'. She admires the old Masters of the Disturbing, the Dramatic and the Grotesque, like Goya, the painters of Romanticism and Symbolism. The viewer is immersed in a world that is hardly related to the visual reality. Her characters are never humans of flesh and blood, Wim Hardeman changes color, alienates and deforms her photographs as long as it takes for a new character to appear. Remains of the original face are present, but more univeral and timeless. She is looking for disturbance: children staring with gloomy eyes, women showing signs of insanity, men with vicious expressions. A horrifying company of a nether world.
Wim Hardeman developed a highly recognizable style over a short time, marked by central compositions, warm colors, focus on the eyes and vague backgrounds. She started painting over photographs, since the nineties she is doing all the work with the computer.
Wim Hardeman is showing the opposite of the traditional depiction of the child. They are not mindless angels but creatures with expressive features and a mysterious spirit: frightened, vicious, sorry and horrifying. Children that are doomed by destiny. Children that no man wishes to father and no woman wishes to give birth to. What applies to her children's portraits is also true for all of Wim Hardeman's other works, even for her animal portraits and most bizar illusion. Her imaginary world proves to be an unsuspected mirror.
Wim Hardeman (1958) lives and works in Amsterdam. Since the early nineties she has exhibited and published nationally and internationally.
website: www.wimhardeman.nl
Loréne Bourguignon
Silvia B
Lisa Holden
Wim Hardeman
Anje Roosjen
Joanneke Meester
Shunji Hori
Netty van Osch