Hans Neleman is an artist, photographer, filmmaker, and creative director. He received international recognition for his photographic work, and more recently has transitioned into assemblage, collage and painting. His work addresses themes like finding beauty in dark subject matter and taboos, and often includes found objects and elements that are transfigured into aesthetic realms. He melds painting, photography and collage into symbolically charged creations. Neleman taught as part-time faculty at his alma mater New York University, the International Center of Photography and the School of Visual Arts.

Over the years Neleman has directed many commercials and music videos. Most recently, in 2021, he directed “Wrong Train” for the Psychedelic Furs. From 2007 until 2021 Neleman was the founder and creative director of WIN-Initiative, a boutique stock photography agency.

Neleman’s photography is highly regarded in the commercial and advertising arena, and his personal work has been exhibited worldwide. Early in his career, he was known as one of New York City’s leading still life photographers, which led to three published monographs of his work. He has lectured and conducted workshops in more than a dozen countries. Accolades include the Hasselblad Master title, American Photographer Magazine Photographer of the Year, Kodak Photographer of the Year, and he is the recipient of the World Image Award for Still Life Photography.

For his paintings, Neleman is working in a predominately grey scale palette. He creates lyrical dreamscapes where elegant body and head gestures emerge from the abstract fields. The fluid brushstrokes give way to adumbral figures who are intertwined but detached. In contrast to his assemblages and collages, these works exude a sense of freedom and mystery. Neleman has metamorphosed the overt erotic undercurrents of his assemblages into sensual and romantic compositions.

Eleanor Flatow - Curator

Neleman’s highly individual assemblages focus on the harmony of opposites. He juxtaposes the vital and the mortal, as well as the myth and the modern tale. While referring at times to dark motifs, his work is also affectingly intriguing, as it is endowed with erotic symbolism and infused with emotional qualities that we recognize immediately as inherent to the human condition. Deeply interested in semiotics and its related disciplines, and a master assembler and conjuror of images, associations and feelings, Neleman reclaims, scrutinizes, and skillfully melds styles, cultures, eras, and emotive states of being into extraordinary works of art.

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In Hans Neleman’s photography, a new world is created. He engages in an abstract dialogue with both his subject matter and the viewer as he presents objects and materials collected on his travels or found at flea markets and in the gutters of city streets. The elements that constitute his imagery are all ‘loaded’; each and every object represents a set of concrete and possible meanings and relations. Each item he selects is carefully juxtaposed with another to create an even deeper meaning as a consequence of their merging. Hans Neleman operates and approaches the task of recording moments in time with the painstaking meticulousness of an archaeologist. He sets up “tableaux” of reality that bear witness to the hand of the master, marked by a photographic style and a cachet of great and unique distinction.

Johan Swinnen - Silence

Neleman has published three books. Moko: Maori Tattoo (1999) was featured at the Biennale de Lyon, France, in 2000 and 2015. ‘Body Politics, Maori Tattoo Today’ was exhibited in 2009 at The Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. Silence (2000) his still life work was shown at the Visual Arts Museum, New York City. Night Chicas (2003) an exposé about prostitution in Guatemala, was launched with a solo show at Ricco Maresca Gallery, New York City. Ken Johnson of The New York Times reviewed his work as “stunning, powerfully theatrical and visually lush.”