Wijnanda Deroo: Mexico 1994: The Cibachromes

Deborah Bell Photographs presents Mexico 1994: The Cibachromes, an exhibition of vintage color prints made in 1994 by the Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo.  This is the photographer’s third exhibition with the gallery.

Deroo is well known for her meticulously composed photographs of interiors, in which people are usually absent.  Her earlier series from the 1980s-early 2000s, such as Amsterdam Hotels, Artists’ Studios, Atlantic City, Brooklyn Night, Curaçao, Disappearing Houses, Lower East Side, Mobile Homes, and New York Eateries, acknowledge human presence without showing a single person.  Deroo has continued this approach in her more recent bodies of work, Behind the Walls of the Hermitage (2018-2019) and Out on the Street: The Dining Sheds & Empty Streets of New York, 2020-2024, photographs she made in New York City during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The art critic Ken Johnson, writing about Deroo’s work in The New York Times, described her photographs as having a “curious, searching quality…as though she were a detective.”

Though her early work from 1980-1995 was primarily in black-and-white, Deroo turned to photographing in color in about 1993.  Because her visit to Mexico was made on the cusp of this transition, a selection of large vintage gelatin silver prints of photographs Deroo took in black-and-white on this same trip will also be available for private viewing during the exhibition. 

Wijnanda Deroo was born in the Netherlands in 1955.  She received a liberal arts degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Arnhem, where she later became a professor.  In 1989 Deroo was awarded an artist’s residency at MoMA P.S. 1 in Long Island City, NY.  She continues to live and work in New York. 

Deroo’s photographs have been exhibited internationally since the early 1980s.  Her work can be found in the permanent collections of public institutions worldwide.