It is the Netherlands as you have never seen it before – the bright colours of tulip fields in Lisse staining deep into the ground, the streets of the Noorderkerk clustered together under an indigo night, the sky darkening over Zuidas with the sands of Sahara in the air.

Turkish photographer and trained architect Murat Germen presents “Holland Re-Visioned” in a new exhibition in the Galerie Boomerang in the heart of the Jordaan.

Walking around the gallery on a busy Saturday afternoon – an oasis of reflection on market day – director Peter Madden pauses at a long work entitled Muta-morphosis Amsterdam #25.

“There are 27 photos in one panorama and this is my house!” he says. “[The artist] takes panoramic shots and puts a finished digital photo through this program, working on various sections to compress certain parts. And this is part of the series Muta-morphosis, like metamorphosis [and mutation]. I love all the distortion, the combination of realism and surrealism.”

At a packed opening evening, neighbours in the Jordaan were intrigued to see their homes as never seen before, views of Delft, Rotterdam, Amsterdam, The Hague, Utrecht, Amersfoort, Leiden and Antwerp – not just through the eyes of an outsider but with a completely unique point of view.

Gaze

Germen explains that he uses computers to achieve a visual effect that the naked eye normally cannot see. “I initially take very long panoramas called hyper-panoramas,” he explains, from Turkey. “Then I squeeze them in the horizontal axis in order to fit a comprehensive 270 or 360-degree content into our typical eye view range, using a scaling algorithm in Photoshop. In other words, I fit multiple gazes taken at different times into a single gaze visible at one time.”

The effect is truly extraordinary, capturing the week-long visits he made to nine cities in 2023 and earlier this year. It’s a snapshot of the modern urban and rural Netherlands – although it retains its essential character, the landscape once painted by Van Gogh – Germen puts it in the context of global urbanisation and gentrification.

He says that he is fascinated by the way cities everywhere begin in a sense to merge. “Cities all around the world started to lose their intrinsic characters and look alike due to the resemblance of the new architectural styles found in real estate developments,” he explains. “And gentrification is a disease that makes some local folks and therefore unique ways of living disappear, [be] displaced [or] dispossessed. Small-scale marginal urban textures vanish and get replaced by larger-scale real estate developments that can be bought only by a certain group of people. This in turn, causes the urban tissue to change.”

There’s a Blade Runner feel to Amsterdam #25, as though you are falling from the skies into layer upon layer of building, people crowded upon one another, the historic beauty of the city crunched together – it’s an impressive effect.

Madden, a Brisbane native, founded the Galerie Boomerang in 1993 to exhibit Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal art from Australia. From 1997, he and his wife and co-curator Abigail Esman worked as private art dealers with the John Lennon and Andy Warhol estates. Then following an extensive rebuild they reopened their Amsterdam gallery in 2020, expanding to represent international, primarily non-Dutch artists, as well as Australian Indigenous art. The current exhibition prices range from €2,950 for a small work to €6,200 for a large one, plus BTW, and the show runs until January 26, 2025.

Walking around the 27 images, on two floors, Madden vividly remembers day turning to night over the Zuidas business district. “This is with the Sahara stand storm that we get every few years, and the sunset was already looking pretty spectacular,” he says, pointing at Muta – morphosis Amsterdam #7. “It took 15 minutes to photograph the sunset with the sand particles in the air, and by the time you get here [to the other side of the work}, the sun had gone down so you get that spectacular fusion of light.”

Colour

Lenny Suiker, assistant director, points to a second series in the exhibition called Facsimile. Here, the artist uses a different technique to cut landscapes horizontally and drag the colours of that cross section down – creating a kind of seizmic section of the earth.

Lisse tulip fields #2 shows the incredible array of colour in this flat landscape, stretching down the canvas with the cross section floating on top. The artist is exploring, he says, the layers of history in this series – but this could almost be an X-ray view of the effects of flower cultivation, staining the soil of the Netherlands.

It’s a view, though, that reminds Germen of traditional images in a place he feels has not lost its unique character. “In each city, except Rotterdam, I observed that the core character, [the] legacy of the city were well preserved and the new developments were kept away,” he says. “The very flat Dutch landscape, though changed with the addition of modern-day industrial and agricultural facilities as compared to what Van Gogh painted previously, still gives visitors what they expect to see.”

His take, however, gives us all a strikingly different angle.

Galerie Boomerang is open on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday from 12pm to 6pm.