Sabrina van den Heuvel

Rahim Redcar unfolds within Sabrina’s ongoing photographic practice as an extensive exploration of a singular presence within contemporary music. Through this long-term series, Sabrina follows Redcar through shifting states of vulnerability, fragility, ecstasy, and reinvention, approaching identity not as a fixed condition, but as a continuous process of becoming. The work explores the tension between public appearance and inner experience, moving between performance and intimacy, movement and stillness. Through a visual language that balances a mysterious, theatrical aesthetic with sculptural black-and-white portraiture, the body becomes a carrier of memory, longing, and transformation. The series investigates the space between the mask and the true self, where beauty and fragility coexist. Beneath the performative surface, Rahim Redcar reveals the complex layers of human presence, vulnerability, and the ongoing search for connection and meaning.

Rahim Redcar unfolds within Sabrina’s ongoing photographic practice as an extensive exploration of a singular presence within contemporary music. Through this long-term series, Sabrina follows Redcar through shifting states of vulnerability, fragility, ecstasy, and reinvention, approaching identity not as a fixed condition, but as a continuous process of becoming. The work explores the tension between public appearance and inner experience, moving between performance and intimacy, movement and stillness. Through a visual language that balances a mysterious, theatrical aesthetic with sculptural black-and-white portraiture, the body becomes a carrier of memory, longing, and transformation. The series investigates the space between the mask and the true self, where beauty and fragility coexist. Beneath the performative surface, Rahim Redcar reveals the complex layers of human presence, vulnerability, and the ongoing search for connection and meaning.

THE GOOD SAMARITAN (2026) In this 2026 series, Sabrina van den Heuvel portrays a dancer as the Good Samaritan — a timeless figure of unconditional compassion. The image embodies the principle of selfless care: an act of kindness extended without expectation, beyond origin, status, or identity. In its original meaning, the Samaritan represents the one who steps outside all social and cultural boundaries to offer help purely on the basis of shared humanity. Through the body of the dancer, this archetype is reactivated and made present. Movement, tension, and vulnerability become carriers of a universal message: that humanity reveals itself most clearly in the act of care itself. Rather than situating the Samaritan in a historical or biblical past, the work positions this figure in the present — as a living gesture, an embodied ethic of proximity. The selfless other becomes not only a subject, but a possibility within every human being.

CONTRITIO CORDIS by Sabrina van den Heuvel Contritio Cordis is a multidisciplinary work by photographer Sabrina van den Heuvel, unfolding as a confrontation with trauma, exclusion, dignity, empathy, and resilience. Volterra Following Corpus Dei, the artist returned to Italy and entered the former psychiatric hospital of Volterra — the Ospedale Psichiatrico di Volterra — a site once referred to as “the place of no return.” Within this charged architecture of abandonment and memory, she worked with model Nicolò Giacopuzzi, encountered by chance and placed within the silent remnants of the institution. The body moves through spaces that still hold the weight of human absence. Here, landscape and architecture become psychological matter. The figure is not staged, but positioned within a field of residual ইতিহাস—where history, fragility, and disappearance converge. Threshold States The work unfolds across states of tension: suffering / resilience exclusion / recognition isolation / connection In these conditions, the body becomes a surface of inscription — fragile, exposed, and unresolved. Through close framing and a stripped visual language, the images hold anxiety, estrangement, and vulnerability without resolution. The viewer is not offered distance, but implication. Artistic Position Contritio Cordis approaches photography as an existential inquiry. The work resonates with the thought of Albert Camus and Søren Kierkegaard, not as reference, but as underlying atmosphere: the tension between meaning and silence, and the question of how the self comes into being within that space. The result is not explanation, but presence — a sustained confrontation with what it means to endure.

Fragments of bodies touch, press against one another, slide along skin. Chalk binds to the surface, breaks open, spreads. Each movement leaves a trace that fades almost at once. The body does not appear as a whole, but as a sequence of actions: pushing, holding, releasing. What becomes visible is not form, but contact — brief, intense, ungraspable. Lines suggest boundaries, yet hold nothing in place. They shift, dissolve, return as residue on the skin. Control and its loss occur in the same gesture. What remains is an image that does not stabilise, but continues to move — between touch and erasure, between presence and the moment it is already slipping away.

Self-Portrait with my Afghan Hounds Bashir and Tiziano This self-portrait, selected and published in the major Dutch art calendar 2024, presents Sabrina van den Heuvel within the intimate space of her studio, accompanied by her Afghan hounds, Bashir and Tiziano. The image is not a staged representation, but a quiet alignment of presence — where artist and animals share the same atmosphere of stillness, trust, and attentiveness. The Afghan hound, with its elongated elegance and ancient bearing, becomes both companion and counterpart: a living echo of grace, distance, and devotion. Within this composition, intimacy is defined not through proximity alone, but through recognition — a shared language beyond words, built on loyalty, observation, and time. The studio becomes a threshold space: between work and life, between control and surrender. Here, the artist is not isolated from her world, but held within it — by gaze, by presence, and by companionship. This image reflects a quieter dimension of Van den Heuvel’s practice: where the act of seeing turns inward, and where love appears not as declaration, but as coexistence.

THE VERTICAL MOMENT – Victoria Koblenko in the Hague Tower For this shoot with Victoria Koblenko inside the Hague Tower, everything revolved around tension, elevation, and complete surrender to the moment. On the uppermost levels of the tower, where the city dissolves into lines and air, the architecture ceased to be a backdrop and became a physical experience. Climbing through the structure—between construction and void—a situation emerged in which control and vulnerability constantly collided. This was a shoot on the edge. Literally. Narrow passages, open height, and an ever-present awareness of risk meant that every image had to be lived, not merely staged. Victoria moved through the space with remarkable focus—almost as if she was not entering the building, but temporarily taking possession of it. For me as a photographer, it was a rare level of trust: access to a location that is not only visually powerful but also physically demanding and potentially dangerous. Creating these images required full concentration, respect for the environment, and absolute presence in the moment. This series is not about the tower itself, but about height as a psychological condition—between fear and control, beauty and risk.

DYING SLAVE (Corpus Dei – Jacopo Studies) This series constitutes the first male nude within Corpus Dei, the breakthrough project by photographer Sabrina van den Heuvel. The work focuses on Jacopo, who posed nude for the first time during this session. His body is approached as a sculptural presence, where vulnerability, tension, and stillness converge into a single visual condition. The series emerges from extensive research into Michelangelo, with particular attention to his anatomical studies and sculptural conception of the human body. These studies form the conceptual and visual foundation of the work. The central image, Dying Slave, marks the culmination of this investigation. It is a contemporary interpretation inspired by Michelangelo’s Crouching Youth and the classical tradition of the dying slave figure. The body appears at the threshold between surrender and resistance, between form and disappearance. Within this context, the body is not represented as narrative, but as condition: a sculptural and emotional field in which art history and contemporary photography intersect.

CORPUS DEI Corpus Dei is the international breakthrough project by photographer Sabrina van den Heuvel. Developed during her artist-in-residence at the NIKI in Florence, the work establishes a visual dialogue with the Italian Renaissance, with Caravaggio and Michelangelo as its primary references. The series was developed with the guidance of the head curator of the Van Gogh Museum, anchoring the project within a distinguished museum and art-historical context. Corpus Dei is published by Lecturis and was selected for a prominent cover position within its publication series — a significant recognition within the contemporary photography and art publishing landscape. In this body of work, the male figure is approached as a sculptural and emotional vessel of meaning. Drawing inspiration from Michelangelo’s sculpture and poetry, Van den Heuvel explores themes of desire, spirituality, and vulnerability. The central figure, Jacopo, embodies the tension between strength and melancholy, placed within architectural and historical environments such as the Villa of Hadrian. Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro serves as a recurring visual foundation, where light and darkness intensify one another within a contemporary photographic language. As in Van Gogh Black & White, Corpus Dei reveals universal emotional states — ecstasy, desire, and stillness — within an integrated universe of photography, art, and poetry.

The jury considered the photograph of the Afghan hound by photographer Sabrina van den Heuvel worthy of an honorable mention. Why? It is an intriguing, bizarre image, because as a viewer you initially don’t quite understand what you are looking at, and once you do see what it is, you think: this can’t be real. Is it a person in an animal costume? Is it an animal? The image is therefore fascinating, because the dog, standing on its hind legs, almost becomes human. With this photograph, it is mainly the originality that stands out—the keen observation, the almost absurd quality. The photography prize is an initiative of the Dutch Association of Insurers. The independent jury for the Photography Prize consisted of Rineke Dijkstra and Wim Melis, curator of Noorderlicht Groningen.