Marie-Jeanne van Hövell tot Westerflier, Hoogwoud, 2022

Museum JAN presents the exhibition Marie-Jeanne van Hövell tot Westerflier - Painting with a Lens. This exhibition offers an overview of the rich and diverse photographic oeuvre that Marie-Jeanne van Hövell tot Westerflier (1953) has created over the past 25 years.

Van Hövell tot Westerflier is a master at capturing silence and using natural light. Her portraits and still lifes are reminiscent of famous Dutch painters such as Johannes Vermeer and Clara Peeters, while her cityscapes evoke memories of the photography of George Hendrik Breitner and Jacob Olie. 'Painting with a lens' is a technique she masters like no other. She creates unique photographic images that transform the present into the past. On the occasion of her 70th birthday, her oeuvre, which occupies a unique position within contemporary Dutch photography, is being shown in its entirety for the first time.

Marie-Jeanne van Hövell to Westerflier

When Van Hövell borrowed an analog Hasselblad camera from Westerflier in 1998, the budding photographer was immediately convinced. The format, sharpness, and artistic possibilities that the camera requires have inspired her to capture recognizable scenes and people over the past 25 years. Van Hövell prefers to work with natural light and therefore always waits for the right moment to immortalize her subject. If a painter is not satisfied with a detail, he can always adjust or correct it with a brush. The lens, however, is unforgiving: corrections are not possible, at least not for Van Hövell, for whom Photoshop is out of the question. She captures a reality that only she knows and can visualize.

Silence and modesty

The exhibition at Museum JAN displays eight different photo series, in which silence and modesty form the common thread, such as De Stille Stad (The Silent City) and Contemplatie (Contemplation). The ingredients for the latter series are objects from her own interior—flowers, fruit, and sometimes a dead insect—resulting in a photo series that betrays an admiration for 17th-century Dutch painting. For De Stille Stad, she also arranged the architectural elements of the buildings to a certain extent through the way she chose her viewpoint and used the available light. Her series Aan het Raam (At the Window) evokes associations with the work of the 17th-century painter Johannes Vermeer. In her portrait photography and the series De Witte Blouse (The White Blouse), she succeeds in capturing the soul of the person portrayed.