Joost Vandebrug

Joost Vandebrug is a Dutch artist based in Antwerp whose work moves between photography, moving image and installation. He treats the photograph as both an image and an object: something that can be taken apart, transferred, assembled and changed by the material carrying it.

Rivers, skies and trees recur in his work, though they seldom appear as straightforward records of a place. He often makes sequences of photographs, transfers their emulsion onto delicate paper and builds larger images from fragments. From a distance, a landscape may seem complete; closer in, its cards, surfaces and small shifts interrupt that certainty.

What interests him is the brief interval between seeing something and feeling sure of what it is. Across Moment in Time, Pillow Book and Not Yet the Image, the work returns to time, perception and memory: what a photograph can hold, and what changes when we look again. His work was included in Beyond the Frame. Rethinking Photography at the Nationalmusée um Fëschmaart in Luxembourg in 2025, an exhibition exploring experimental photography through abstraction, materiality and space.

His moving image work includes multichannel video installations made from views of the sea and the Danube.

Vandebrug also directed Bruce & the Outlaw (2018), a documentary filmed over several years in Bucharest.

Joost Vandebrug is a multidisciplinary artist who studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.