Renaat Nijs is a photographer based in Hasselt. He works on two tracks: commercial interior and architecture photography for clients including De Standaard Magazine, Het Belang van Limburg and corporate commissions, and an artistic practice in which the image is allowed to be damaged.[^1]

Renaat was born and raised in Hasselt and holds a master’s degree in Multimedia Design from LUCA School of Arts in Genk. As a photographer he is self-taught.[^2]

For *MAVICAZINE*, a magazine made with Raf Horemans, Renaat photographed with fifty Sony Mavica cameras from 1997 and struck the floppy disks with a hammer while they were writing — a method he calls “analogue editing”. The work won the *Show Me The Pixels* category at the Small File Photo Festival at The Photographers’ Gallery in London in January 2023.[^3]

In 2024 Renaat and his partner Raïsa Moureau took over Martelarenlaan 18 in Hasselt, a townhouse that had housed three generations of artists since 1911. On 8 May 2025 they opened **NUMMER18** there, an art house with free admission. Renaat is co-initiator and curator.[^4] From May to August 2025 he showed **CAR BLANCHE** there, a series of six photographs of white delivery vans — shot over five years in Tokyo, Cape Town and points between — on which visitors were invited to draw in pencil. “A photograph is often seen as something you mustn’t damage. I wanted to break that taboo,” he told Het Belang van Limburg.[^1]

Alongside CAR BLANCHE, Renaat has shown work in recent years at Antwerp Art Weekend (2020), at ROHO Genk and Winterstill Houthalen (2022) and at several editions of Kunstennacht Hasselt (2023–2025).[^5] He is resident photographer for Wanderful.design and has produced exhibition photography for Tim Walker (C-mine) and Michael Beutler (Z33), among others.

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## Sources

[^1]: Het Belang van Limburg, 8 August 2025 (Rudi Smeets) — “Fotograaf Renaat Nijs geeft expobezoekers car(te) blanche”.
[^2]: UiT in Hasselt, 24 April 2025 — birth and home town; existing WP record `renaat-nijs` (post-ID 6567, 2017) for master’s in Multimedia Design at LUCA Genk; HBVL (same 2025-08-08 source) for “self-taught photographer”.
[^3]: Unthinking Photography — “Less > More” interview MAVICAZINE (confirms *Show Me The Pixels* category); The Photographers’ Gallery — Award Ceremony, 28 January 2023 (Small File Photo Festival group event); UiT in Hasselt 2025-04-24 for the hammer-on-floppy detail.
[^4]: Het Nieuwsblad, 7 May 2025 (Christof Rutten) — “Prachtig atelier van drie generaties kunstenaars gaat na 15 jaar nog eens open tijdens Kunstennacht”.
[^5]: WAN-27 factsheet (`01-research/wan-27/factsheet-renaat-nijs.md`), section “Erkenning & exposities” — combined from pipeline research (renaatnijs.be), UiT in Hasselt and Kunstennacht announcements.