Maurice Scheltens & Liesbeth Abbenes
Apeldoorn/Asten, NL, 1972/ 1970 Works and lives in Amsterdam
Maurice Scheltens (1972) studied photography at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague. Liesbeth Abbenes (1970) studied Audiovisuals at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. As a duo they have worked on autonomous art since 2002 and have been commissioned by many international cultural institutions, businesses and magazines.
Scheltens & Abbenes, a designing duo, play with photography’s provocative possibilities for creating illusions. They meticulously arrange various objects (chairs, shirts, bottles of perfume) into compositions with a strongly two-dimensional or graphic quality. The result is an optical illusion: flat things become three-dimensional and vice versa. They do not present objects as everyday, marketable products, but manipulate them into building blocks for new compositions.
Essential to the work of Scheltens & Abbenes is the creative process in the studio where they construct their settings. It is an almost laboratory-like process, with the duo continually moving and adjusting items. They specifically opted to work in the field of both applied art and autonomous art, whereby each field serves as a culture medium for the other. A photograph’s autonomous artistic quality is always of foremost importance.