For enquiries please contact:
info@erikkessels.com

Erik Kessels

Born in 1966, lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Erik Kessels is a Dutch artist, designer and curator with great interest in photography. Erik Kessels is since 1996 Creative Partner of communications agency KesselsKramer in Amsterdam and works for national and international clients such as Nike, Diesel, J&B Whisky, Oxfam, Ben, Vitra, Citizen M and The Hans Brinker Budget Hotel. 

As an artist and curator Kessels has published over 70 books of his 're-appropriated' images: Missing Links (1999), The Instant Men (2000), in almost every picture (2001-2019) and Shit (2018). Since 2000, he has been an editor of the alternative photography magazine Useful Photography and has written the international bestseller Failed It!

For the DVD art project Loud & Clear he worked together with artists such as Marlene Dumas and Ryuichi Sakamoto. Kessels writes regular editorials for numerous international magazines. He lectured at the D&AD Presidents Lecture and at several international design conferences such as in Singapore, Goa, NY, Toronto and Bangkok. He has taught at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam), Écal (Lausanne), Raffles (Milan) and at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture where he curated a celebration of amateurism. 

Kessels made and curated exhibitions such as Loving Your Pictures, Mother Nature, 24HRS in Photos, Album Beauty, Unfinished Father and GroupShow. He also co-curated an exhibition called From Here on together with Martin Parr, Joachim Schmid, Clement Cheroux and Joan Fontuberta.

In 2010 Kessels was awarded with the Amsterdam Prize of the Arts, in 2016 nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2017-2019 his mid-career retrospective was shown in Turin, Budapest and Düsseldorf and exhibited this year in the MOMA. He was called “a visual sorcerer” by Time Magazine and a “Modern Anthropologist” by Voque (Italia).