Maarten van der Ende was born in 1958 in Deventer, the Netherlands. His father’s work meant his family lived in no fewer than four countries during the first 14 years of Maarten’s life: Zimbabwe, the Netherlands, France and then Switzerland, where Maarten finally settled in 1972.

He grew up with plenty of contact with the art world. During his youth, his father regularly took him to exhibitions. One of these, Picasso at the Palais des Papes in Avignon, left a big impression on him, as did the regular visits to the Maeght Fondation in St-Paul de Vence and the Léger Museum in Biot. Maarten went on to complete a four-year course in Photography at the School of Applied Art in Vevey, Switzerland.

While Maarten was studying, he began regularly exhibiting his own photographs, notably at the ‘Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie’ festival in Arles. This set the ball rolling and galleries across Europe soon started approaching Maarten with offers of representation. That was at the beginning of the 1980s when, in his eyes: “Photography didn’t yet have the profile and recognition it enjoys nowadays.”

Maarten’s influences include Ed Ruscha for his artist books, Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst for their collages, Mimmo Rotella for his torn posters, and the paintings of Bram van Velde and Cy Twombly, as well as the work of Le Corbusier. “I feel the need to surround myself with this artistic universe, and to practise drawing, engraving and collages myself,” he says. “It’s a way of integrating my interests, apart from photography.”