The person behind ArtMarket

Alexander van der Meer

Founder and curator

I was born in Utrecht in 1981 and grew up around drawings and plans — my father worked in architectural engineering and my mother in interior design. I studied Art History and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam, then spent several years working across European galleries, photography fairs and independent studios, mostly in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

What kept pulling my attention was not the established names. It was independent photographers whose work had a clear identity of its own and no international audience yet. In 2018 I opened a small studio in Amsterdam and started working directly with a handful of them, and with the collectors who bought from me. Friends, interior designers and architects kept asking where the work came from. ArtMarket grew out of answering that question often enough.

It was never meant to be a catalogue of thousands of anonymous images. I wanted something closer to a contemporary art studio that happens to be online, where every artist and every work has a reason for being there. I still travel between Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, Lisbon and Milan to see exhibitions and meet photographers in their own studios, and I still choose the work one piece at a time.

I am not interested in selling an image simply because it is beautiful. I want to understand why it exists, who created it, and whether it will still mean something to the collector years from now.