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Nico Krijno (b1981) is an artist working with video. staged photography, and collage* in an experimental photographic practice that investigates contemporary visual codes, archetypes, symbols and patterns.   Exploring not only these methods of creation but the spaces in-between
︎︎︎ pure research














FAQ (NATURE VS. CULTURE) Seeing is Not Believing 

most of these words were written on my phone whilst hiking barefoot on an empty stomach 


I am not in search of the perfect moment.
I use photography to create new worlds within my perceived reality, to ask questions about memory, photography, and its representation and re-presentation.
I work with both analogue and digital tools, and I also use the clone stamp and the lasso tool.
Rather than merely capturing emotion, I aim to evoke an emotional response in the viewer that feels strangely familiar. A kind of alchemy, a trompe l’oeil, a Brechtian making strange.
My work does not follow a linear series. It is one continuous and interwoven body of work, like a conversation that never stops. Ideas shift over time, older themes return, and new ones appear.
I am not only interested in what lies in front of the camera. I am equally drawn to what lies behind, beneath, and to the side of the frame.
Good ideas matter more to me than sharp or colourful or pretty pictures.
Photographs should rarely need text to support them, although that itself may be untrue.
I am guided by the basic tenets of Gestalt theory: proximity, similarity, continuity, closure, and connectedness.
I follow gut feelings through my one right eye.
I use video, photography and painting in conversation with each other.
My influences include Michael Schmidt, Roe Ethridge, John Divola, John Gossage, Lucas Blalock, Robert Cumming and Richard Tuttle.
An image made with a smartphone is as meaningful as one made on large format or with a potato pinhole camera.
I knew all of this before, but I lacked the language to express it.
I am interested in sculpture and form, but my main concern is transformation, the moment when a thing becomes something else through the camera.
My work can be read as a sampler of photographic genres. Portraits, landscapes, nudes and still lifes sit together to reveal the medium and its limitations.
The only part of my process that I truly value is intellectual curiosity expressed through experimentation. Strategy over certainty.
If I ever begin to know exactly where the work is going, I will stop.
This is an ode to effort.
My work lives inside my body. Mind, body and technology.
I use what I find lying around and convert this debris into a theatrical mise en scène through a form of creative alchemy.
This urban jetsam and flotsam carries its own knowledge and its own built-in aesthetic, which I unearth and explore in my constructions.
I try to surprise myself, to make unsolvable pictures that I have not seen before, and to get beneath the surface.
I trust the indecisive moment.
I believe in the power of the single image, but I am increasingly interested in the patterns and associations that appear when images are sequenced in a book or on a wall.
In a time when the internet is overwhelmed by slick and generically stunning AI images that cause visual fatigue, I sense the rise of a counter image. The idea of photography as a truthful index of reality is dissolving.
What is an image of, when anything can be faked? Does subject matter even matter?
A lo-fi Polaroid of your lover may one day feel more radical than a billion Midjourney hallucinations.
The near future of photography feels post gloss, grainy and unpolished, tactile, raw, and full of error. Embedded work such as film, damaged negatives, timestamped chaos. Work that asserts presence.


































AVAILABLE WORKS


All works are in a Limted Edition of
03 Prints only
certain works are UNIQUE

Mostly works on paper
Archival Inkjet print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag®
+ certificate of authenticity
certain works are printed onto 100% Cotton Hahnemühle Cézanne® Canvas

︎ see also

send all your requests to nicokrijno@gmail.com

































































































































       







All content copyright the artist. No commercial use without express written permission.

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︎︎︎take me home.                                                           













Nico Krijno is an artist who explores photography,
at the intersection of collage, painting and video
Probing the boundaries of each, resulting in unique abstractions:  

An intertextual dialogue opens up between his artworks, and allows for a surprising tone to the assemblage. Krijno describes the process of photographing these ephemeral structures as a private physical performance, with the camera being the audience.

Often working with discarded found materials, he interprets and re-organises them in a non-linear manner in the pursuit of finding alternative structures for how meaning and matter are constructed and perceived.

Using his body and movements based on gestural abstraction, creating a direct link between the body and the natural flow. Re-introducing a dynamic relationship with nature, bringing nature back into the world in reaction against the man-made- manufacturing process

With a filmmaking background, working in the theatre and experimental video fields both as video editor & cameraman.  Nico Krijno switched camps to the field of visual arts around 2008.

His photographic practice with its focus rooted in process and experimentation is realised in a variety of media, formally and technically diverse. combining analogue and digital and cameraless tools resulting in participatory installations, sculptural interventions, video+sound


He has exhibited work across Europe, Asia and the US, and worked for major brands like  Givenchy, Caron, Loewe, Kartell




RECENT NEWS

Interview with Rica Cerbarano for il giornale dell'arte

DOWNLOAD CV 🕳️

L’Appartement – Espace Images Vevey



Sport in FocusCOLLECTION OF THE OLYMPIC MUSEUM AND PHOTO ELYSÉE 28.03 – 18.08.2025

Groupshow: 21.11. - 06.12.2024

On Archives
THRYVE Group X ThirdSpace  ZURICH
thirdspace.ch

Arles, France (July 1 – September 29, 2024)
Olympism Made Visible,  partnership between the Olympic Museum and Photo Elysée

Paris (July 26 – August 11, 2024)
The Olympic Museum, in partnership with various locations to ticket holders during the Olympic Games
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Maison de l’Amérique Latine, works from Olympism made Visible series

Los Raros/Las Raras, Nuevas Narrativas del Collage Contemporáneo, Valladolid, Spain, May 10 - 7 July 2024





Solo Presentaion at Asama International Photo Festival 2023 - PHOTO MIYOTA in Japan 7/15 - 9/3 2023

SOLO SHOW: Resistance Relapse  29 June — 12 Aug 2023
Huw Davies Gallery / Photo Access Canberra Australia

Group Show: Distortion: Where to Now? Cultural Goods Gallery Toronto, Canada

Recent: Past

The Constellation ,The Ravestijn Gallery, 21 January - 4 March 2023


One of a kind - 10 year anniversery show with unique pieces.
The Ravestijn Gallery
  3 September - 22 October


BELFAST PHOTO FESTIVAL. 2-30th June 2022 Solo outdoor Presentation ︎

Screen Age III: Still Life - RIGA PHOTOGRAPHY BIENNIAL 2022, April 22 – June 12| Riga Art Space,Latvia.  ︎︎︎(Installation)

ART ROTTERDAM. GROUPSHOW THE RAVESTIJN GALLERY, Rotterdam 19 -22 May 2022
Exclamation Mark | The Ravestijn Gallery, Amsterdam 12 March - 23 April 2022
Subject Object Exhibit @ Saint Lawrence University, Brush Art Gallery
January 19 – February 26, 2022 Curated by Sarah Knobel
THE CONSTRUCTED IMAGE. GROUPSHOW THE RAVESTIJN GALLERY, AMSTERDAM
17 July - 11 September 2021
UNTITLED, ART Miami Beach,Online Viewing Rooms Dec 2,3,4,5,6
The Henie Onstad Triennial for Photography and New Media Oslo, Norway February 21–May 16, 2020






















































































































































































































00-629001-67843-1


this site is a bridge

under construction.



Would you like a guide or will you venture on your own?

01


y

a ladder.          x
xxy

this site is a mirror




i have no answers
only questions   questions about photography
questions about today
,
its the 4th of March 2025, Paris
and im sitting on the floor typing on my notes app:

[Pay attention to fleeting thoughts]
artmaking as spiritual practice
in times of constant uncertainty, radical upheaval and transition (impermanence)
(a constant work in progress)

1.b
The trouble in the world is not there to defeat or to harm us,
but to awaken us to the unlived lives within us 
the longings and the callings that our souls would have us follow

How do we make work about the ‘now’ ?
Where are we even now?

Have we perhaps over adapted to a world that cannot give us what we are looking for?
(toxic resilience)
The old world is dead, the new one is not here yet.  The world you want to be in, isn’t here yet.

This place isn’t a place, It’s a moment—a moment where everything collides, where time is stretched, folded in on itself


2

What is it that we need most in a time of radical uncertainty and upheaval?
What is being magnified by all the radical instability? Perhaps we have to rethink the idea of community* as society gets more divided and polarised by extreme ideologies

When most levels of nature and aspects of culture are simultaneously manifesting disruptive symptoms, we have a greater need for symbols that can remind us of the underlying unity and beauty, that could help us find ways to connect the moments we are living
no matter how broken they might seem













































































                                                                                                 









 





















































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