Bertien van Manen

Bertien van Manen (the Netherlands, 1942-2024) lived and worked in Amsterdam. Van Manen produced intimate portraits of the people she photographed, immersing herself in their lives in order to reveal the poetry of the everyday. Since 1990 she had taken extended trips within Europe as well as to China and the former Soviet Union, capturing commonplace scenes of people in their homes or enjoying recreational activities. Van Manen drew us into the private lives of her subjects to reveal a poignant meditation on human existence.

Her most recent monograph, Beyond Maps and Atlases, was published by MACK (2016). She has released seven previous monographs including A hundred summers, a hundred winters (1994); East Wind West Wind (2004); Give Me Your Image (2005); and Let’s sit down before we go (2011); as well as the book I will be Wolf (2017), the overview book Archive (2021) and the publication Gluckauf (including an exhibition at SCHUNCK, in her birth town Heerlen (2023).

Van Manen’s work has been exhibited internationally at museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of New York, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Fotomuseum Winterthur in Switzerland, the Photographer’s Gallery in London and the Metropolitan Museum of Photography, Tokyo. She has two retrospective exhibitions to her name – at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2019) and at FOMU Antwerp (2022). Her work was shown as part of exhibition Some Things Hidden at Framer Framed, Amsterdam (2018).