About
Hi, I’m Ed.
I'm Ed Reininga. I was born in The Hague in 1964 and work from my studio in Assen, the Netherlands. I make abstract photographs. They begin in the physical world — light on water, a surface, a movement — but I'm not chasing the subject. I'm chasing the moment it stops being a thing and starts being a state. I enlarge, isolate, and hold it still until form, colour and structure slowly loosen and something quieter underneath comes through. There's a place I've always called No Man's Land — the threshold between two states, where the edges blur. It's uncomfortable to stand there. The instinct is to run back to the familiar or leap ahead to the new. The work is what happens when I stay on the threshold long enough for the complication to fall away and something clear to take its place.
I've never done one thing for long. Every seven to ten years I begin again, consultancy, then designing toys, then e-commerce, then a high-end products venture.
Photography ran underneath all of it. I exhibited between 2007 and 2013, then stepped away. Not from the work, but from the circuit around it: the openings, the committees, the noise. I liked making the work more than I liked the world it asked me to perform in.
In 2024 it started again, on my own terms. Reininga gathers work from across those years, some of it made long ago, now retitled, sequenced into coherent series, and sharpened to match who I am now. It's the same body of work as my earlier label, Images from Within, just seen more clearly.
I name a work and then let it go. What you find in it is yours.
— Ed
Statement
About the work
I work with light the way a geologist works with rock — looking for what pressure leaves behind.
The images begin in the physical world. A surface caught at the moment it stops being itself and becomes something else. I enlarge, isolate, hold it still. The surface reads precise — light caught, held still — yet the logic is physical. Pressure. Drag. Erosion. Release.
Across the series, I return to a few quiet structures: apertures, rings, seams, mirrored axes, fields of grain. They don't point to objects. They behave like openings. The eye keeps re-scaling — microscopic one second, sky-wide the next. What felt distant becomes interior.
Texture matters here. Not as decoration — as evidence. Scratches, particulate noise, soft distortions. Records of friction and time. The image remembering everything it has touched.
Color is the atmosphere. Electric blues that lean toward shadow. Heated reds. Golds that flare into white. Not description. Temperature. Pressure. Something the body registers before the mind names it.
Time runs through all of it. Not as subject but as condition. A seam where one state changes into another. Stillness that isn't empty — the now gathering into substance rather than passing through.
Color becoming a place you can enter.
— Ed
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS (2007–2013)
2007 Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte Contemporanea, Florence, Italy
2007 Galerie Vonkel, The Hague
2007 Galerie Spiegelbeeld, Emmen
2008 Galerie Kunst aan de Kade, Rotterdam
2008 Galerie Kunsttotaal, Emmen
2008 Galerie de Valk, Harlingen
2009 Galerie CBK/Vanderveen, Assen
2009 Kunstproeverij, Groningen
2009 Open Atelierroute CBK, Assen
2009 Management Resultants Noord, Groningen
2009 Galerie Coopvaert, Rotterdam
2009 Galerie Kunsttotaal Emmen
2010 Park Gallery, Hoorn
2010 University Medical Centre Groningen (UMCG)
2010 ArtEvenTT, Assen
2011 Der Aa-kerk, Groningen
2011 Gallery Pot, Axel
2011 Van der Valk Hotel, Groningen-Zuidbroek
2011 De Vaart, Assen
2012 Galerie Lemferdinge, Eelde
2012 Gallery Pot, Axel
2012 Kunst op Nienoord, Leek
2013 Kasteel Heeswijk, Heeswijk Dinther
2013 Kunst in Bergen
2013 Kunst in Ootmarsum
Invited to exhibit internationally — London, Paris, New York, Miami, Dubai, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Florence, Salzburg, Rio de Janeiro, and others.
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS
Dutch Florence Biennale Artists, 2007 — ISBN 978-90-79045-01-3
Catalogo Biennale Internazionale dell'Arte Contemporanea
Images from Within, Ed Reininga
RTV Drenthe
Radio Emmen
Noord-Hollands Dagblad
Radio Hoorn
TRAINING & RECOGNITION
Background in computer science and business administration. Certified transpersonal coach/therapist. Self-taught as an artist. Registered professional artist with Centrum Beeldende Kunst (CBK) Drenthe.
STUDIO
Assen, the Netherlands. Studio visits by appointment.