Gert Jan Kocken

Gert Jan Kocken (b.1971, Ravenstein) is a visual artist living and working in Amsterdam. He graduated from the Royal Academy of the Arts in The Hague in 1998 and will hold a residency at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam in 2011. For his work Kocken performs extensive research before he photographs the objects involved in parts, which he later conjuncts into one print at almost actual size or even enlarged a few times (Depictions of Amsterdam 1940-1945, 2009 and Enola Gay Tibbets, 2010). Both in solo and group exhibitions, his work has been exhibited widely in the Netherlands and abroad of which the most recent were his solo exhibition Positions this summer at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and Monumentalism, the municipal art acquisitions at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. 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. The exhibition Questioning History, in 2008 at the Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, featured a large selection of Kocken's Past in the Present series.