Details

Patricia de Ruijter (1962) Amsterdam The Netherlands.                                                                              Patricia is an independent visual artist, who specialized in abstract-figurative digital photography, drawing, and painting. She was trained at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy from 1991 to 1995. Since 2002, she has been teaching and mentoring students in their graduation year at the Fotoacademie Amsterdam. As an artist annex curator, she has been initiating and creating international, interdisciplinary, and experimental art projects and exhibitions since 2000.

As of 1998, the foundation of De Ruijter’s body of work has been a philosophical and deeply personal awareness of ‘space’. In her work, she explores how the natural, energetic, and cultivated environments merge, creating images of an inspiring ‘experiential space’.
With her photography, she is a true pioneer. By abandoning the conventional perspectives of the medium, her groundbreaking work moves between surrealism and abstract art. Through animal and botanical angles, she leads the viewer into a new, poetic world. Characteristic is a pure, unfiltered observation, captured in minimally manipulated and, non-staged images.

The unique, self-developed technique of free camera movement is closely related to écriture automatique, the ‘automatic writing’ of André Breton (1896-1966), the theorist of Surrealism. With this technique, De Ruijter makes visible the ‘indefinite space’. This direct and expressive transmission of the subject is also evident in her works with ink, pencil and paint on paper.

She has received several work and production grants from The Mondriaan Stichting Fund, Netherland Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture, Amsterdam Art Fund, New York City Council, and others.
Her work has been part of many exhibitions, art festivals, art projects, and accompanying publications. To name a few: Rotterdam Photo (NL), Zoöp/Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam (NL), Art City NDSM-Wharf, Amsterdam (NL), Art Festival Ground Three, Den Haag (NL), Test Portal now art Gallery, Amsterdam (NL), Art Community Rijkshemelvaartdienst, Amsterdam (NL), International Art Festival Triple X, Amsterdam (NL), Art Gallery AETHER, Sofia (BU), Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, New York (USA), International Art Festival, Magdeburg (G), P-House Gallery, Tokyo (JP).
In 2014 her photo book BEINGS, the wild Phenomena of Now was published by Lectures.