With closed eyes I open my gaze.
Story
Bernard Coops is an artist whose work centers on the relationship between sensory experience, memory, and the unspoken. Guided by an intuitive process, he approaches photography as a means to make the intangible perceptible—without reducing it to explanation. His practice investigates how images can function as sites of association rather than representation.
Through the use of distortion, repetition, transparency, and shifts in scale, Coops develops a visual language that is fragmentary and layered. Shadows, reflections, and textured surfaces recur throughout the work, creating images that appear to hover between presence and absence. Rather than offering fixed meanings, the work deliberately avoids closure, inviting moments of disorientation that encourage the viewer to slow down and remain with ambiguity.
Personal experiences inform the work as points of departure, not as literal subjects. This distance allows the images to operate beyond autobiography, opening space for collective memory and individual projection.
Coops graduated in Illustration from the Art Academy CABK (now ArtEZ) and works across photography, film, and design. He teaches photography and new media and has exhibited internationally, including at the Rubin Museum in New York and Galería Laguanacazul in Buenos Aires. His recent work was featured in the LUMEN ’25 project at the Fotoacademie.
EDUCATION
2026 – Fotoacademie
2004 – ArtEZ University of the Arts
EXHIBITIONS
Fec. 2026 – Traces, Québec CAN
Dec. 2025 – LUMEN ’25, Haarlem NL
Mar. 2015 – Bodies in Balance, Rubin Museum NY, USA
Apr. 2010 – Vectores Invertidos, La Guanacazul BA, ARG