Description
Justus de Rode [b. 1997, Netherlands] is a visual artist based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. While working across various media, his practice is rooted in photography. With an academic background in Interdisciplinary Social Sciences (BSc) and Film & Photographic Studies (MA), his practise reflects a research-driven and cross-disciplinary approach. Growing up in a painter’s family, by contrast, fostered a visual sensibility that resonates in the introspective and pictorial qualities of his work. De Rode describes his work as an ongoing fight against the photographic, questioning fundamental properties of the medium while oscillating between analysis and affect. This tension between reason and emotion lies at the core of his artistic inquiry, often metaphorically reflected in subjects drawn from ecology, geology, natural history, and nature itself.
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Views of Nature
In his series Views of Nature (2024–2025), Justus De Rode explores the eponymous travelogues of 19th-century naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859), who is considered the father of ecology. As a product of Romanticism while simultaneously laying the foundation for a scientific discipline, Humboldt serves as an allegorical personification of De Rode’s exploration of the interplay between rational thought and emotional experience in perception. Using excerpts from Ansichten der Natur (1808) as both titles and starting points, De Rode oscillates between analysis and affect, exploring both his surroundings and his inner world… READ MORE
