Unseen 2023: Find us at booth #4

We are thrilled to announce that we will be participating at this years Unseen art fair in Amsterdam showing new works by Dirk Hardy.

For his solo exhibition at Unseen 2023 Hardy presents a dystopian world. With 'Vivarium', an ongoing project that he started in 2018, Hardy constructs hyper-realistic worlds that express the complexity of our zeitgeist. In a series of tableaux vivants, Hardy designs, builds and photographs his own full-scale fantasy worlds. Before starting his photography studies, Hardy studied Architecture at Eindhoven University of Technology. He uses his technical background to build his own sets, light boxes, and window frames. He combines this with his artistic training, designing every detail of the set, from the clothes and objects to the attributes of his characters. Furthermore, as the photographer, Hardy meticulously stages his hyper-realistic universes to create a ‘purposeful fiction’. Hardy builds handmade frames for his photographs, creating a physical window that acts as a portal into his ominous realms. This illusion of a window is enhanced by the self-designed light boxes in which Hardy mounts his photographs. Each episode of the Vivarium series has its own theme and shows a different complexity in our daily lives. His subjects range from the disneyfication of our colonial past and digitally created personalities to his own solitude experiences during the Covid pandemic. In his work, photorealism, fantasy and reality intermingle. As a result, the viewer is confronted with a series of dystopian scenarios of our modern society. 

For the first time on show is Residue City, a series of constructed landscapes in which Hardy invites us to experience a post-Anthropocene world. In Hardy’s Day & Night series we witness a fictional landscape where low sea levels are exposing former land masses to the sun. 

Find us at booth #4