International Orange
Limited edition of 3 Signed Artist Proofs For Sale. 

$1,200 Custom • 29x34 Black wood Frame • with 3" White Matte • AR glass • Signed and dated
​$900 unframed 17x22 Archival • Digital Color Print • Signed and dated

#A 09

#A 11

#A 10

#A 12

#B 13

#B 15

#B 14

#B 16

Introduction  by Dewitt Cheng Curator, Stanford Art Space 
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Nico Van Dongen’s striking Golden Gate Bridge photographs, made during the past three years, concurrent with the pandemic, combine a contemporary experimental and experiential approach to photography with a traditional yearning for meaning or transcendence. The Dutch artist, resident in the Bay Area since the early 1990s, has driven across the bridge for twenty-five years. Unlike those of us habituated to the bridge experience, Van Dongen, an immigrant from the Netherlands, continued to be thrilled by this “magnificent monument, ” an “engineering marvel.” Three years ago, on an impulse, he grabbed his camera, a Canon point-and-shoot, gripped it to the steering wheel, and shot a sequence of images, one per second, approximately, as his car zoomed across the bridge. Reviewing the sequence later on his computer as a series of stacked layers, the artist saw that the images, despite having been shot without careful framing, captured the dynamic experience plunging through space on the bridge in a way that perfectly composed images could not. The images could be composited with some layers made semi-transparent, and with certain features—the horizon, the heavy main suspension cables—aligned, producing ethereal and hallucinatory images. The effect is vivid, even visionary, yet the means are simple: a car, a camera, and a computer—and a sensibility honed on decades of photography.

Art mavens will remember that the tumult of contemporary city life was the subject of Cubist and Futurist painters a century ago. The French Cubists analyzed still-life subjects, faceting space into crystalline planes and combining multiple views to create a new reality of shifting perceptions. The Italian Futurists exalted speed and the machine, reacting against their country’s industrial backwardness and worship of tradition, injecting Cubism's calmly contemplative vibe with energy, even violence. (Futurism's leader, and chief promoter, F.T. Marinetti, once boasted of being "the caffeine of Europe.") In the New World, Joseph Stella’s Cubo-Futurist painting of the Brooklyn Bridge from 1919-20 depicted that structure as composed of transparent planes, both ephemeral and monumental. A striking moving-picture equivalent to these paintings can be found in Dziga Vertov’s brilliant pioneering avant-garde silent film, Man with a Camera (1929), which captures a day in the life of urbanized Russia with a dazzling array of cinematic techniques. In a brief but unforgettable sequence, young women riding in an open car on a sunny day are filmed by the director’s brother, cranking the heavy tripod-mounted movie camera in a following car. The women’s delighted excitement at this thrill of the new is infectious, even a century later.

Van Dongen’s bridge photography follows this modernist tradition of depicting contemporary life with contemporary technology and aesthetics. The images are shot offhandedly with a casual point-and-shoot or cell phone camera when the artist drives alone, and more deliberately, with higher-grade cameras (Leica and Nikon DSLR) when he enlists his wife as chauffeur, but his long experience with photography has enabled him to trust to chance and his instincts to capture the moment: “I don’t have to look through the viewfinder.”​

Every bridge drive is for the artist an unpredictable adventure in “harvesting images,” collaborating with traffic and weather. The low level of traffic due to divers working from home during the pandemic was a creative benediction for Van Dongen, a green light from the Source (or photographic gods) to proceed freely without slowing, stopping or looking back. These wondrous photos, with their stately repetitions and superimposed multiple  cables, towers, and lights, reveal the bridge anew, stripped of its postcard-cliche baggage. The Golden Gate is revealed to be a massive, soaring steel temple, timeless and eternal, and yet as remote and unattainable as Cézanne’s Mt. Sainte-Victoire or the holy mountains of any preindustrial culture, delicately wreathed in clouds and mist, space, light, and time. ​