Paris Photo 2025

Keteleer Gallery is pleased to make its debut at Paris Photo 2025, bringing together three distinct voices in photography whose works probe the boundaries of image, place, memory, and the interplay between the seen and the imagined. The presentation features Dutch artist Paul Kooiker, Belgian artist Sybren Vanoverberghe, and the late Austrian pioneer Lois Weinberger.

Paul Kooiker (b. 1964, The Netherlands) is well known for a photography practice characterised by its conceptual rigour, unusual compositions, and an ability to evoke psychological ambivalence. His images often feel like cinematic fragments—open-ended, dream-like, rich with suggestion and tension. At Paris Photo, Keteleer Gallery presents the Fountains (Paris) series (2000), which show public fountains in Paris in various forms and states, combining formal beauty with subtle undercurrents of longing, erosion, or decay. These works are visually striking, detached from a precise narrative, yet steeped in atmosphere. Shown for the first time are works from Seminar (2006): a series of 30 duotone photographs that hone in on legs, shoes and the implied presence of a female figure whose identity remains elusive. With Seminar, Kooiker furthers his exploration of voyeurism, collecting, fetishism, and the unsaid.

Sybren Vanoverberghe (b. 1996, Belgium) works with photography, installations, structures, and found objects, exploring landscapes and the traces they carry to show how place and time are always in flux. His works weave together history, nature, and cultural heritage, creating a dialogue between ruins of the past and the everyday environments of today. His artistic language shifts between documentation and imagination, often collapsing the difference between what was, what is, and what could be. He has worked in settings ranging from industrial zones to desert environments, from Europe to the Middle East, exploring how land, ruin, temporal flux, and cultural heritage intersect. For Paris Photo, Vanoverberghe’s work includes new explorations of these themes, bringing together pieces that challenge viewers to think of a photograph not just as representation but as artefact—an object in history and material presence.

Lois Weinberger (1947–2020, Austria) was a foundational figure in what can be called environmental poetics. His work from the 1970s onward focused on marginal zones—ruderal plants (so-called “weeds”), ephemera, vernacular materials—and the ways in which nature and human practice intermingle in what we often overlook. For its debut appearance at Paris Photo, Keteleer Gallery is showing his early photographic series Baumfest / Tree Celebration, Stams / Tyrol, July - September 1977. Baumfest is one of Weinberger’s first major works. It stages a cherry tree in the village of Stams, decorated from a distance like a ritual or folk-festival tree, but the closer you come, the less noble the materials: plastic sheeting and plastic bags transform into garlands and balls draped over branches. The work thus draws together folk tradition and found, everyday detritus. One critical detail: the colourful plastic remnants left by floods of the Inn River in its surrounding thickets inspired Weinberger to think of Tibetan prayer flags, linking ambient detritus to spiritual or communal symbols. The scale, material, colour, and ornamentation of Baumfest—as captured in the photographic prints—retain a freshness, urgency, and resonance, even nearly fifty years after it was made.