Johannesma, Rob
Geleen, 1970
Lives and works in Amsterdam
In his photographic collages, Rob Johannesma combines news photographs with historical artworks. By playing with the composition and using multiple copies, the artist creates a visual mechanism which reduces the news photograph to its essential image and at the same time brings the art-historical icon down to earth.
During Glocal Affairs, Johannesma will be exhibiting two of his photographic collages. In “Gold Leaf”, a reproduction of the stained-glass window “The Repose during the flight into Egypt” – originally from the Mariawald convent in Cologne and now in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London – is combined with the image of an Iraqi who finds the body of his brother in Baghdad. In “Blue and Black”, a newspaper photograph of a dead member of an Islamic militia in Somalia is coupled with a newspaper photograph of a painting by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder: “The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man.”