Ilse Leenders Rotterdam | ND

Born in 1979, Ilse Leenders graduated in Photographic Design at The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in The Hague, The Netherlands in 2001.

Her work originates from an anthropological perspective and is founded by historical and cultural research, with focus on eastern philosophy and humanities.

She interferes in land or cityscapes and use the (artificial) nature as a ‘stage’ to construct a (theatre-like) contemporary story with elements utilized from the past and present. The staged photographs display a composed interplay between imagination and reality. The components in her photographs consist of self-made artifacts or ready-made objects regularly in combination with personages. By bringing together different aspects in a single image, detailed narratives arise that can be perceived as movie stills or images from a comic book.

In her work Leenders strives for balance and harmony of elements arranged. As in a flower arrangement, Ilse Leenders creates in a detailed staged scene, an abstract, aesthetic, silent world in which man, environment, scenery, object and action are carefully balanced and connected.

Since 2014 Ilse Leenders is affiliated as a lecturer at The Royal Academy of Art (KABK) The Hague and since 2015 she is a student at the Master in Education in Arts at Piet Zwart Institute Rotterdam.