Atlas of Echoes

Atlas of Echoes is the first monograph on the work of Dutch artist Sarah van Rij. The book immerses the reader in her entire oeuvre, bringing together her black-and-white and colour photography, as well as the collages created since 2018, and in doing so charts the journey from her beginnings as a photographer to her most recent work. Whether captured on a camera or an iPhone, her images explore a wide range of subjects — urban and natural landscapes, everyday objects, the human figure – at the same time as they advocate the singular and coherent aesthetic that has become the artist’s visual signature.

With a vivid imagination and a keen eye for detail, she transforms reality into a timeless, dreamlike world; and through her delicate framing, its point of view jostled about by shadow and reflection, she composes with a subtle game of recurring motifs: hands, shoes, profiles, traffic lights. These shapes serve as clues, visual echoes that run through her entire oeuvre, linking together her images like the fragments of a puzzle that sketches out the map of her poetics.

Designed in close collaboration with the artist, with an index offering an analytical and playful reading of her work, Atlas of Echoes reveals the singular formal vocabulary behind van Rij’s practice.