Hotel Granvia, Okayama

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Willem van den Hoed
1104, 2020 (Hotel Granvia, Okayama)
inkjet on Photo Lustra Premium paper RC
169 x 152 x 1 cm

About the work

Artist Willem van den Hoed (1965, Hoogeloon, The Netherlands) gives us a view from a hotel room at Hotel Granvia in Okayama. He not only shows us what is going on outside, the busy traffic of people, cars and busses at the bus terminal below, but also gives us a peek at the inside of the hotel. The reflections of the room or hallway he is in are clearly visible in the image. With this he constructs a frame of lines that guides the eye of the viewer to the middle of the photograph.

About the artist

Willem van den Hoed’s work is a completely new approach to the medium photography: the hundreds of photographs he takes of the same location on different times of the day, with different light and reflections, function as brushstrokes to a painting. These fragments of light and time are built into large, very sharp photo-works, creating a new reality. It takes about one month to build one large photo-work.

Willem van den Hoed graduated from the department of Architecture of the Delft University of Technology in 1992. He established his own architecture-practice in 1998 and realised several projects under his own name in the Netherlands. From 2000 to 2006 the transition took place from the applied art of Architecture to the creative independence of the Artist.
Since 2007 the works have been shown at several museums and art galleries in The Netherlands as well as at numerous art fairs in Europe and Asia. Willem van den Hoed lives and works in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) and Seoul (South Korea).

The artist about his work

“On our way to my in-laws in the late summer of 2018, we had chosen a stopover in Osaka. A week before we left, there was a pretty strong earthquake in Osaka and we decided to take a Shinkansen (high-speed train) to Okayama. We found a hotel above the train station and hoped our two-year old would find it interesting.

He did indeed spend a lot of time on the windowsill, together with his father who took a total of 957 shots with his Nikon. It then took two years for that cloud of nearly a thousand photos to take its final shape. The composition consists of six perspectives, taken at different times of the day, each from a slightly different distance from the window, which are carefully superimposed.

A telescopic four-dimensional image of the Okayama station area with wife and son in the centre.”

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