Installatie 1931 - 1937

These photographs of an ‘Installatie’ are part of an album held at the Rijksmuseum made by an anonymous artist. Looking at these images, I feel like I'm staring at the guts of something much larger, like peeking inside a machine that dreams. There's a real tension between the industrial coldness of the metal and the almost organic pattern of those repeating vertical lines – they remind me of gills or the inside of a lung. I wonder, did the artist see it that way too? It makes me think about Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of industrial structures, where the subject matter is presented in a typological, documentary style, revealing the hidden beauty and complexity of functional objects. It is this approach which transforms them into objects of contemplation and wonder.