Micky Hoogendijk was born in Amsterdam in a family of artists, gallerists – her grandfather was noted art dealer Dirk Albert Hoogendijk – actors, and dancers. Soon enough, she entered the art scene herself, open to different art endeavours, namely cinema and art. That was until 2012, when the camera her late mother Gine gave her proved to be a gift that would change Micky’s life. She taught herself photography while she was living in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Austin, focusing on casual portrait and street photography. In 2015, her first personal exhibition The Other Side of Fear Is Freedom is hosted at the Eduard Planting Gallery in Amsterdam. Her first museum retrospective, Through the Eyes of Others I See Me, was held at the Jan van der Togt Museum in Amstelveen in 2017. In 2018, Micky Hoogendijk moved back to Amsterdam, where she currently lives and works. Her house/atelier is Huize Zonnewijzer, a historical building that also houses The Ones at Home, a cooperation project between Hoogendijk and garden designer Erwin Stam. Here, Hoogendijk creates her bronze sculptures, one of which is currently on exhibition in Venice as part of Personal Structures 2024 – Beyond Boundariers exhibition, produced by the European Cultural Centre. Her new piece The Ones I – XXL version is a monumental bronze sculpture four metres tall that shows the harmony between vulnerability and strength, individuals and groups. They are a tribute to human beings looking for connections. The artist named them the Ones, because they are human individuals supporting one another to become stronger.

In a Biennale that shows the diversity of the individual as an absolute value, you address the same theme in a poetic way with the sculpture The Ones. What is the significance of the union and how does it relate to the theme Foreigners Everywhere?
The beautiful thing about this question is that I started making this piece before they announced the theme of La Biennale. As humans, we all have something in common as per what’s on our minds, what we are occupied with, the way we see and feel the different things that happen in the world. As artists, this is something we want to express. My experience is that of a complicated family structure. I lost two children, and during the COVID pandemic, I wound up staying alone in my studio in the nature. Every politician on TV maintained how we were all in this together, and how we were meant to stand together and be strong to survive this pandemic, while I just sat there by myself. To go on, I devoted myself to my art. I made no sketches, I just started working and these figures just appeared. I think they represent the fact that we all come from the same source, a mother and a father, and we all have some family in our lives. What you see here, though, is not a family—it’s us, it’s the world we live in together. Now, this is my personal story, maybe a story about what I was missing, maybe a story about what people see in themselves. I’m trying to push into the universal, to connect with everybody we can imagine.

The figures are also connected in turn…
Yes, this is the most important part. The tile of this piece is The Ones, because we all are one, we want to be individuals and feel independent. We often feel like familial relationships are too complicated, but the truth is, I cannot function without you, I cannot function without other people. I really want to honour this concept with my art.

We can see this sculpture also like roots of the trees.
In my opening speech, I had fifty friends and collectors from all over the world join me. They are my root people; root people are the most important ones. And what is underneath that? What makes it stick? There’s a lot of concrete and foundation work and bolts and fasteners. It is all very strong and also vulnerable. We are vulnerable in all of this.

What does your creative journey look like? And what inspires you?
I was an actor first. I come from an art family – everybody in my family is either an artist or an art collector. Art, I breathe it. I was married to a very famous artist, too. As for myself, I thought I was going to be an actor, I thought my artistic journey was going to be that, and then my mother, right before she died in 2009, gave me a camera as her last gift. I moved to the US and I felt she was with me, inside my camera. I took to the streets and took pictures of everything. By the two-year mark, I was everywhere with my photo art, and I travelled for ten years doing this. It wasn’t easy, but it was so great! Still, I wanted to create more than 2D images, I wanted to grow into 3D. I wanted to keep going. Because of COVID, I finally had the time to try. That’s what my journey looked like.

What inspires you?
As far as inspiration goes, I grew up with seventeenth-century masters due to my grandfather being an art dealer. The house was filled with everything. I felt history within me, it was everywhere. But the art I make, it comes from the heart. It’s like a child drawing figures in the sky. It’s love.

The truth is, I cannot function without you, I cannot function without other people

What further projects will you be working on?
I can’t help but wanting to make art that is larger and taller and go higher. Currently, I have this art projects, two or three ten-metre-tall figures walking towards you. It all starts as in a dream… I’m looking at three large sculptures of different sizes, going up to ten metres. It takes months for such a large-scale project to come into fruition, and there’s so much to learn. I worked with a team of craftsmen who helped me immensely. Thanks to them, my dreams can become reality. I am 53, the only issue, now, is having enough time! But I love this. These are my children, they will be travelling and learning different languages. I will travel the world through them.

The subjects of your photo art.
People, people, people. It’s the people that I love, especially when they are a little broken. My book Vulnerability and Strength shows explains how I see it: I think vulnerability is the strongest, most powerful quality we have, if we show it. We all pretend to be something – it’s normal, we do that to survive. But the moment you show who you really are, that’s when I’m in love.

This is your first time in Venice.
I came here after COVID. Can you imagine how fast everything went? I’m so honoured to be here, I really am. Honoured because of this place I can show my art in, with everyone’s going to the Biennale, because people can actually go inside and touch it, interact with it. When you make art, it all flows from you, naturally, but what happens next? I love it when people see their own stories in my work, I feel like being given a present. There’s so much more, many more interpretations, many more stories to tell. Everyone tells their own. I really made an effort to make a soft entrance, like water in a river. I made a ten-minute video, posted on my website, to explain this. It makes more sense in video format than it does in words.