Michiel Kluiters creates monumental, painterly photographic works that exist on the plane between sculpture, photography, and painting. He builds improvised architectural scale models in his studio, which he then photographs in sharp detail. These images invite viewers to step right into empty spaces that feel tangible yet elusive. Through a combination of light, shadow, perspective, colour, texture, and detail, Kluiters achieves a distinctive alienating effect, where the images seem addressed as much to the hands as to the eyes; longing to be touched, stroked, felt.

For Kluiters, empty space is not absence but something full, charged with meaning. The spaces he constructs resemble unfinished utopian buildings or abandoned ruins still under construction or already decaying imbued with a sense of time that suggests both future completion and lingering memory. This sense of temporal instability is key to the emotional charge of his work. By choosing to present photographs rather than the physical objects themselves, Kluiters dwells on the fragile boundary between presence and absence, reality and fiction.

His fascination with scale began during his studies at the Rietveld Academie, where he built scale models of rooms as personal, safe workspaces within the chaotic studio environment. These intimate, smaller-scale spaces allowed him to push his creativity while maintaining grounding. Later, after his time at The Ateliers under guidance from artists like Willem Oorebeek and Rita McBride, Kluiters further developed his focus on how photographic enlargements of these constructed spaces could visually transform existing environments.

Kluiters’ current process is intuitive and irrational. He allows roughly built models to emerge organically, without strict design plans, letting the materials themselves inspire the form and meaning. The models act as constellations; structures to catch light. Spatial illusions appear only when light interacts with them, captured in his photographs. The photographs, enlarged and captured in extreme sharpness, reveal every surface detail and imperfection, contributing to an archaic architectural language. Classical elements like windows and doors, embedded in our perception, intensify the spatial experience and challenge the viewer’s sense of scale and reality.

His studio is filled with fragments he continuously reshapes and rearranges, engaging in a cycle of careful looking, reacting, and experimentation. His constructed spaces serve as portraits of his inner world staged, inhabitable places that surround his field of vision. These works evoke unfinished utopias or ruins, charged with a poetic instability and a sense of ongoing transformation or decay. The photographic works can be experienced as a moment of meditative stillness, or else as spaces tinged with unease, perhaps even echoing a quiet dystopia. Kluiters consciously plays with the viewer’s perception by withholding clear cues of scale and reality, inviting personal interpretation and engagement.

Ultimately, Kluiters’ work orchestrates a single stilled two-dimensional image where light, materiality, scale, and spatial illusion converge. It challenges viewers to navigate the complex interplay of presence and absence, and to step into a space that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.