Wijnanda Deroo Photographs

Wijnanda Deroo was born in the Netherlands in 1955. She received a Liberal Arts

Degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem, where she later became a

professor. Originally visiting New York City on sabbatical in 1988, she found herself

a year later to be the recipient of an artist residency at P.S.1. Since then she has

divided her time between Amsterdam and New York.

Making the spaces in which we live and work the central concern of her

photography, Deroo does not confine herself to any one walk of life. Instead, she

turns the same incisive eye on government buildings in Russia as on mobile homes in

upstate New York and synagogues on New York’s Lower East Side.

Working in both color and black & white, Deroo utilizes natural light and an absence

of human subjects to create an atmosphere that draws the viewer in, whether in her

streetscapes, landscapes or portraits of interiors. An avid collector of dollar store

Americana, Deroo offers up commentary on kitsch in her unlikely still-lifes of vases,

plastic flowers and figurines.

Her photographs are in collections worldwide, among them New York’s Museum of

Modern Art, Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum, and the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora in

Tel Aviv. She is represented by the Robert Mann Gallery in New York.