Dutch photographer Carla van de Puttelaar is a graduate of Amsterdam’s Gerrit Rietveld Academie and has exhibited in Holland, Hungary, Germany, France, Spain, South Korea and the USA. Her work has been awarded the Dutch Prix de Rome, one of the country’s highest art honours.
With a corpus of fine art portraits, nude studies and a scholarly approach to the use of light, van de Puttelaar’s work has drawn critical comparisons to the works of the Dutch Golden Age of painting. Her compositions are deeply intellectual, demonstrative of a rigorous working knowledge of the national art history of the Netherlands -- but without ever sacrificing the sensuality and sensitivity of their subjects.
Recent work has seen her move from the female body that has dominated much of her previous photographs, engaging instead with flowers and other naturalist images. In these, van de Puttelaar has discovered many of the same qualities: textures, skins, sensitivities as unique to the subject as the way light plays on their surfaces.
