Connecting people through art 

Van der Meer studied photography at the MTS School for Photography; he then attended the National Academy for Visual Arts in Amsterdam, graduating in 1986. His work has been shown in galleries and institutions across the Netherlands, as well as in cities such as Frankfurt, Milan, and Beijing. Hans van der Meer looks to the details of the landscape for clues into collective identities and desires.

In September 1995 Hans van der Meer started to work on “Flemish Fields” in serach of lower division amateur football games in The Netherlands (later extending to Flanders and other countries). He went out looking for football in its original form, as it had started more than hundred years ago: a plot of ground, 22 players, hardly any spectators around the pitch, just a horse in the next meadow.

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The work is as much about landscape as it is about culture at large. Amateur football turns out to be the perfect metaphor for life in general.

With a mild irony, Van der Meer shows us the mismatch between human ambition and the effective result, between an individual’s ‘inside’ perception and a more objective, distanced view of our behaviour.