Gert Jan Kocken
Gert Jan Kocken (b. 1971, Ravenstein, Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. He graduated from the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague and held a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam. His work is an ongoing research into the remembrance and visual representation of pivotal episodes in world history. By creating new juxtapositions of historical images and texts, he offers the viewer multiple viewpoints that encourage the contemplation of alternative readings and counterfactual histories. His work has been part of the group exhibition Nature as Artifice (2008 – 2009) shown at the George Eastman House, Rochester, the Aperture Gallery in New York, the Alte Pinakothek in Munich and at the Kröller Müller Museum in the Netherlands. Here are some recent exhibitions: Organized Complexity, Grimm Gallery Amsterdam (2019); Now is the time, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; No you won’t be naming no buildings after me, curated by Vincent van Velsen, Tent Rotterdam (2019).
Gert Jan Kocken, Depictions of London 1939-1945. Courtesy of the artist.