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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. His monograph Paradise (Komma, 2020), with a foreword by Erwin Olaf, is held in the research libraries of the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Getty Research Institute and the Library of Congress.
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.
Van Schalm developed his practice in a long dialogue with Erwin Olaf, who mentored him until Olaf’s death in 2023 and wrote the foreword to his first monograph, Paradise (Komma, 2020). Made in the Philippines, French Polynesia and Israel, the book explores the human body in landscape. It is held in the research libraries of the Rijksmuseum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Getty Research Institute, the Library of Congress, the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and Museum Voorlinden.
His later series moved further into landscape. Don’t Stop Dreaming (2025) places the body in the desert of Joshua Tree and Palm Springs; Change (2025) looks at the constant movement of bodies and environments. His ongoing series The Natural World turns to colour, atmosphere and light.
In nature, time slows — and attention returns.
I photograph the moments when a landscape stops being a view and becomes a condition: the minute before dawn when sea and sky share one colour, the edge where light turns sand to gold, the cloud that settles on a mountain and hides its shape.
My work began with the human body in landscape. Over time the figure has stepped back. In The Natural World the landscape itself carries the presence the body once held.
The Natural World Ongoing
The Natural World is an ongoing series about colour, atmosphere and light. Sea, sky, sand, fern and cloud are photographed at the moments when their edges soften, at dawn, at dusk, in mist and in moving water. Horizons run through almost every image and give the series its calm, level rhythm.
Don’t Stop Dreaming 2025
Made in the desert of Joshua Tree and Palm Springs, Don’t Stop Dreaming lets the body become a resonance of the landscape around it. Light, heat and open space shape the figure as much as the figure shapes the image.
Change 2025
Change is about life’s constant state of movement: of bodies, of environments, and of what remains when something has passed.
Paradise 2020
Paradise is where the work first found its own language. Made in the Philippines, French Polynesia and Israel, it explores the human body in nature. Published by Komma (2020) with a foreword by Erwin Olaf.
“The artist has not only succeeded in capturing the beauty of man, but also the fragility of our surroundings as soon as we are outside of our urban bubble.”
Erwin Olaf, foreword to Paradise, 2020
“A paradise composed of men with the presence of Greek statues and the raw poetry of nature.”
Gwénaëlle Fliti, Fisheye Magazine #70, 2025
“His photographs, marked by formal clarity and expressive restraint, combine human figures, landscapes, and organic forms to explore presence and emotional tension.”
Raed Bawayah, Eyes on the World, 2025
Portrait of Christopher Makos published by Museum Brandhorst, Munich, in Magazine for the exhibition Andy Warhol & Keith Haring. Party of Life, 2024.
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