Lot Essay
Jan Rothuizen studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam (1987-88) and De Ateliers, Amsterdam (1993-95). The work of this Dutch artist and writer is not easily categorized under one heading. Rothuizen employs photography, drawings, texts, and on-site infiltrations to detach images from their original context, in order to present them anew in full vulnerability and implicit pliability. The boundaries of the personal and communal shift constantly. His recent project, The Last Tourist in Cairo, (shown at The New Museum in New York (2008)), mimics by means of hand-drawn maps the particular way we read cities as we wander through them as an observer, while clay portraits reflect on how he is observed as a foreigner in Cairo. Rothuizens work has been exhibited at Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City, New York, (2007); Singapore Art Museum (2007); Townhouse Gallery of Contemporary Art, Cairo, (2006); Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou, (2004); Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessalonica (2003); Artforum Berlin with Ellen de Bruijne projects (2003); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2002); and Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2001). The artist publishes regularly in De Groene Amsterdammer and Vrij Nederland. Work by Rothuizen was on view in the group-exhibtion UNLIMITED.NL#4 at de Appel in 2001.