about the designer
Maurice Scheltens
Working in the fields of fashion, art and advertisement, the Dutch photographer Maurice Scheltens creates still lives that are both hyper realistic and completely artificial. Objects taken from the worlds of commerce, fashion and design are removed from their natural habitats and placed in a new environment, often exposing them to uneasy conditions. Remote controls, haute couture dresses and cut-out pictures of fruits, vegetables and plants are dangling on cords, balancing on other objects or left all alone, lost in a monochrome background.
Scheltens deliberately chooses to operate both in the fields of applied and autonomous art and use them as breeding ground for one another. He borrows from the visual languages of fashion, advertising and Dutch symbolic painting the importance of styling and communication, but employs it as a tool to investigate conditioned ways of looking.
Partnering with visual artist Liesbeth Abbenes, the studio Scheltens & Abbenes has worked with clients such as Adidas, AirFrance, Audi, Habitat, K-swiss and Sony, and have been exhibited in Stedelijk Museum, Seoul Art Center Design Museum, Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem, W139 in Amsterdam, and Nederlands Foto Instituut in Rotterdam, amongst others.
