Madelon Hooykaas

Else Madelon Hooykaas (born 28 September 1942, in Maartensdijk) is a Dutch video artist, photographer and film maker. She makes films, sculptures, audio-video installations and has published several books.

Biography

Madelon Hooykaas grew up in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. Before leaving for Paris in 1964, she studied under various Dutch photographers.

In 1966, she received the Europhot prize as a young photographer representing the
Netherlands, and left for England for the photo project Along the Pilgrim's Way to
Canterbury - inspired by Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales - and stayed as a visiting
student at the Ealing School of Art & Design in London.

Her professional interest is in film making and photography as a tool in conceptual art,
especially in so-called sequence photography. She worked in Brussels in a film laboratory
and in Paris as a film assistant before establishing herself as a freelance photographer and filmmaker.

In 1968, she travelled to the United States for a year on a grant from the Ministry of Culture.
In New York, she was assistant to photographers Philip Halsman and Bert Stern and was
taught by photographers Gary Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz. In California, an encounter
with Alan Watts marked the beginning of her lifelong interest in Zen Buddhism.
Back in the Netherlands, she settled in Amsterdam and started writing articles for Foto
magazine, for which she interviewed Robert Doisneau and Jacques Henri Lartigue, among
others. She worked briefly as a portrait and fashion photographer, meanwhile
experimenting with Polaroid photographs in combination with texts and producing screen
prints.

In 1970 she left for Japan to interview a number of photographers and with the aim of experiencing life in a Zen cloister. She was the first European woman to get permission to stay in a traditional monastery to take photographs. In 1971 her photo book ''Zazen'', was published, for which she and the Dutch poet Bert Schierbeek compiled the texts. The publication of this book greatly enhanced her reputation and English and German editions followed. Five years later another book appeared, ''Death Shadow'', for which Hooykaas made the photos and Schierbeek wrote the poem.

In 1972 Hooykaas held solo exhibitions of her Polaroid experiments in Il Diaframma in Milan, and The Photographer’s Gallery in London. Her work plays with space and time. Photo works by Hooykaas form part of the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou/Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (Paris) and the University of Leiden.

In 1972 Hooykaas started an intensive collaboration in the field of film with the Scottish photographer and filmmaker Elsa Stansfield in London and Amsterdam. Their first movie, ‘Een van die dagen’ (One of Those Days) was broadcast by Dutch public TV in 1973. It was also shown at festivals in London, Toronto and New York. After that followed ‘Overbruggen’ (About Bridges) (1975), which was shown in several festivals including Cork, Rotterdam, and Grenoble.

Under the name Stansfield/Hooykaas they made their first video installations from 1975 onwards including ‘What’s It to You?’ (1975), Journeys (1976), Just Like That (1977) and ‘Split Seconds’ (1979).

Their work deals with the relation between nature and spirituality and explores scientific principles and natural forces such as radio waves and magnetic fields. Hooykaas and Stansfield make use of contemporary technology such as film, audio and video in combination with organic materials such as sand, glass and copper.

A comprehensive monograph ''The Artist as Explorer'' was published by Jap Sam Books in 2023.

Recent Exhibitions

• 2025 - Disruptions. Early Video Art in Europe, FMAC, Geneva, Switzerland

• 2019 - Everything is Round, Centraal Museum, Utrecht, the Netherlands

References

* Else Madelon Hooykaas (photographs and diary) and Bert Schierbeek (essay) ''Zazen'', 1971, N. Kluwer, Deventer; a German edition of ''Zazen'' was published in 1972 by Otto Wilhelm Barth Verlag, Weilheim Obb, BRD; and the English edition of ''Zazen'' in 1974 by Omen Press, Tucson, Arizona, USA.
* Else Madelon Hooykaas / Bert Schierbeek ''Death Shadow'', 1976, Fiz-Subverspress, Alkmaar. The poem ''Death Shadow or Else Madelon Hooykaas' also appeared in: Bert Schierbeek ''De gedichten'' he Poems de Bezige Bij, Amsterdam, 2004, pp. 522–528.
* Else Madelon Hooykaas 'Vita in Sequenza' in ''Il Diaframma'' no. 172, May 1972, p. 7.
* Else Madelon Hooykaas 'Time, an Abstract Symbol' in ''Creative Camera'' no 99, September 1972, London, pp. 318–319.
* De Boom in natuur, cultuur en religie, edited by Wouter Prins, Museum for Religieuze Kunst, Uden, , p52-3, p57, p93.
* Madelon Hooykaas (photographs and diary) and Nico Tydeman (essay) ''Zazen nu - Het dagelijks leven in een Japans zenklooster'', 2010, Ankh-Hermes, Deventer.
* ''Revealing the Invisible - The Art of Stansfield/Hooykaas from Different Perspectives'', Edited by Madelon Hooykaas and Claire van Putten, 2010, de Buitenkant Publishers, Amsterdam.
* Dorothea Franck 'Kunst en aandacht – Het beklimmen van Mount Analogue’ in: ''Stansfield/Hooykaas - Revealing the Invisible'', De Ketelfactory, Schiedam, 2011, pp. 19–29.
* Imai - distributor of Video art: https://web.archive.org/web/20140222171319/http://www.imaionline.de/content/view/228/lang,de/
* EWVA European Women's Video Art in the 70s and 80s Edit by: Laura Leuzzi, Elaine Shemilt, Stephen Partridge, Publisher: John Libbey Publishing Ltd UK, 2019
* https://www.horsecross.co.uk/media/2044/read-more-laura-leuzzi-and-iliyana-nedkova-on-madelon-hooykaas-issue-14-low-res.pdf

External links

Website Madelon Hooykaas

Website Stansfield/Hooykaas

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hooykaas, Madelon
1942 births
Living people
Photographers from Rotterdam
Dutch video artists
People from De Bilt
20th-century Dutch photographers
21st-century Dutch artists
20th-century Dutch women photographers
21st-century Dutch women photographers
21st-century Dutch photographers
20th-century Dutch women artists