biography
Marike Schuurman is an artist/photographer born in Groningen, in the Netherlands. She studied photography at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where she obtained her BFA in 1998. Immediately afterwards she continued with a two-year stay at the Rijksakademie van Visual Arts in Amsterdam.
In 2003 she received a stipend from the Dutch Fonds BKVB (Mondriaanfonds) for a one-year stay at Künstlerhaus Bethaniën in Berlin, and again in 2008 for a six-month stay in Beijing, China, and also in 2009 for a stay in São Paulo, Brazil.
Schuurman’s work is exhibited internationally, including at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, FOAM Amsterdam, Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, Helmhaus Zurich in Switzerland and KINDL, Center for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Her work is part of collections such as Sammlung Hoffmann in Berlin, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and KPN in The Hague, the Netherlands. Since 2003 she lives and works in Berlin and Amsterdam.
Marike Schuurman’s work explores the ambiguity of man-made spaces and landscapes, as well as the mediums of photography in which she works. While Schuurman’s approach can be described as documentary – her subjects are usually connected to a particular location, often as curious phenomena of this particular reality – the final images depart from the realm of the documentary and move towards a conceptual and sensory contemplation about what we see when we look at a photo and what was there initially.
