My work begins with a gap. What I see and what you see are not the same thing, and neither of us knows exactly where the difference lies. That unresolvable distance is what I keep returning to.

I work with photography, prints, light, and sound to make images that resist settling into certainty. Color is my primary material and my primary problem. I am colorblind, which means I have always experienced color as compressed, contingent, and frequently wrong by consensus standards. I find that interesting rather than limiting. It raises a question I cannot stop asking: who decided what correct seeing looks like, and what gets excluded by that decision?

My work does not answer that question. It holds it open.

Merette Uiterwaal (b. 1990, Amsterdam) has exhibited internationally, including Photo Brussels Festival, Art-Icon Paris and Arles, Affordable Art Fair Amsterdam and Brussels, Klotz Shows and De Galerie Rotterdam and Den Haag. She works with multiple galleries across the Netherlands and Belgium.

Artist statement:

Merette Uiterwaal's practice departs from a fundamental instability in the act of seeing. Working across photography, experimental prints, light and sound, she interrogates the assumption that vision is neutral, shared, or objective.

Central to her work is the question of perceptual authority. Color functions in her practice not as aesthetic material but as a normative system, one that determines what counts as correct seeing and who is positioned outside that consensus. Uiterwaal's color blindness is not biographical context but structural method: a condition that makes visible the constructed nature of visual agreement itself.

Her photographic images undergo material translations that sever them from their documentary function. Prints dissolve into painterly surfaces; lightbox works collapse into graphic abstraction. These are not formal gestures but epistemological ones. The photograph is treated as a site of uncertainty rather than evidence, a record of what was seen and physically produced by a particular body under particular conditions. The blur is not incidental. It is the mark of a presence that refused to disappear behind the image.

Sound enters the practice as an extension of this logic, translating visual material into durational experience and further displacing the primacy of sight. Across media, Uiterwaal's work does not argue for a counter-vision. It exposes vision itself as argument.