Wijnanda DEROO (Dutch, b. 1955)

Mérida, Mexico, 1994

Cibachrome print, made 1994

paper 33-7/8" (86 x 76.2 cm); image 28 x 28" (71 x 71 cm)

signed & dated in ink on recto

Deborah Bell Photographs presents Mexico 1994: The Cibachromes, an exhibition of vintage color prints made in 1994 by the Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo in Mexico.  This is the photographer's third exhibition with the gallery.

Deroo is well known for her meticulously composed photographs of interiors, in which people are usually absent.  Her earlier series from the 1980s-early 2000s, such as Amsterdam Hotels, Artists' Studios, Atlantic City, Brooklyn Night, Curaçao, Disappearing Houses, Lower East Side, Mobile Homes, and New York Eateries, acknowledge human presence without showing a single person.  Deroo has continued this approach in her more recent bodies of work, Behind the Walls of the Hermitage (2018-2019) and Out on the Street: The Dining Sheds & Empty Streets of New York, 2020-2024, an exhibition of color photographs from two series made in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.

As Robert Mann Gallery aptly stated in their press release for an exhibition of Deroo's work held there in 2004,

Deroo is well-versed in the vernacular of the commonplace -- there is an echo of human presence in the unremarkable architecture and objects she photographs.  ... [Her work is]  also distinguished by a masterful sense of color, light and composition, allowing deeper themes to rise to the surface: the universality of human environments in the industrialized world, the melancholic beauty of the mundane or deserted, and unexpected links between disparate cultures.

The art critic Ken Johnson, writing about Deroo's work in The New York Times, described her photographs as having a "curious, searching quality...as though she were a detective."

Though her early work from 1980-1995 was primarily in black-and-white, Deroo turned to photographing in color in about 1993.  Because her visit to Mexico was made on the cusp of this transition, a selection of large vintage gelatin silver prints of photographs Deroo made in black-and-white on this same trip will also be available for private viewing during the exhibition. 

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.  In 1989 Deroo was awarded an artist's residency at MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City, NY.  She continues to live and work in New York. 

Deroo's photographs have been exhibited internationally since the early 1980s.  Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Central Museum, Utrecht; Gemeente Museum, Amsterdam; Groninger Museum, Netherlands; Jewish Museum, New York; LaSalle Bank Photography Collection (Bank of America Collection), Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Moderna Museet, Malmö, Sweden; Musée Nationale d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Museum Arnhem, Netherlands; Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel Aviv; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Noord Brabants Museum, 's-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands; Printenkabinet, University of Leiden, Netherlands; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, among many other public institutions worldwide.

Gallery hours for the exhibition are Thursday-Saturday, 11am - 5pm.  For further information please contact the gallery at 212-249-9400, or by email at info@deborahbellphotographs.com.

High-resolution scans are available to the press.