Biography

Ruben van Schalm (b. 1988, Rotterdam) is a Dutch visual artist working between New York, Amsterdam and Tel Aviv. His photographs and films record light, water and weather, and the slow time of the natural world, and ask one question across every series: how long are we able to stay with a single moment?

Van Schalm developed his practice in a long dialogue with Erwin Olaf, who mentored him and wrote the foreword to his first monograph, Paradise (Komma, 2020). The book brings together nudes and landscapes made in the Philippines, French Polynesia and Israel, exploring the human body in landscape and the traces a body leaves in nature. It is held in the research libraries of the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Getty Research Institute and the Library of Congress, among others.

In 2024 his portrait of the American photographer Christopher Makos was featured in Art Magazine’s coverage of Museum Brandhorst’s Keith Haring & Andy Warhol – Party of Life. In 2025 his work appeared in Fisheye magazine and in Eyes on the World (Kamira Institute, Paris).

His work has been exhibited in Amsterdam, Berlin and Paris. His current series is The Natural World.