Immediately following his first American museum show at the
Chelsea Art Museum, the Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art gallery
is proud to announce an exhibition of large black-and-white photographs
by Wouter Deruytter.
For more than four years Deruytter has repetitively photographed
the omnipresent billboards strewn throughout the streets of New
York City. A native of Belgium, Deruytter adopted New York as his
home more than a decade ago. Creatively inspired by this complex
city and its overabundance of commercial advertising, he began to
record the visual substance of these gigantic pictures as well as
New Yorkers’ curious reactions to the images.
These billboards, in many ways, capture the peculiar forces found
in the existence of many New Yorkers, a kind of balanced blend of
high art and vibrant commerce. The billboards are massive, often
provocative, and seemingly impossible for New Yorkers to ignore.
Yet they often do.
Deruytter captures the interactions of people going about their
quotidian affairs, who sometimes are overwhelmed by these colossal
images, but often find them just as easy to ignore completely. Deruytter’s
New York is one that exists only through the probing lens of his
camera, which captures real people and their surreal counterparts,
all in one affectionate gaze.
Deruytter began his art studies at the Ghent Royal Academy. He later
went on to study at the International Center of Photography in New
York. Deruytter has exhibited extensively throughout Europe, Mexico,
and the United States.
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Wouter Deruytter:
Billboards NY
+ View full exhibit
|