SDMA | Ruud van Empel: Theatre - San Diego Museum of Art

February 8–July 27, 2025

Dutch photographer Ruud van Empel (b. 1958) asks us to look at the world as if for the first time. Hovering between reality and artifice, his photographs offer an impossible density of detail and intensity of color. Van Empel creates these pictures over hundreds and even thousands of hours, constructing them digitally by combining fragments of photographs he makes himself, a collage technique he has explored since the mid-1990s. The final pictures are imaginary, almost hallucinogenic illusions that celebrate nature’s wonders yet also stress its perpetual conflict in crowded spaces where elements vie for visual priority.

Van Empel is best known for his images of children set within elaborate environments. In the panoramic landscapes in this exhibition, these settings move from the background to the foreground. The artist made the source photographs for these pictures on his travels, from botanical gardens in his native Netherlands to California’s Joshua Tree National Park, capturing daytime and nocturnal scenes of the forest and desert. These dreamlike landscapes invite viewers to step inside and to perceive the world with fascination and even disbelief as they ponder photography’s relationship to truth.