Katrien de Blauwer
Isabelle (6) 2016
Photographic collage, 13.6 × 18.6 cm, unique piece
© Katrien de Blauwer. Courtesy Galerie Les filles du Calvaire.
Isabelle (37) 2019
Photographic collage, 9.2 × 12.6 cm, unique piece
© Katrien de Blauwer. Courtesy Galerie Les filles du Calvaire.
Isabelle is 24 years old ... Isabelle is 42 years old
Katrien De Blauwer, "photographer without a camera" as she likes to call herself, collects and recycles photographs and images from old magazines and newspapers. Her work is both intimate, in direct correspondence with our unconscious, and anonymous through the use of found images and body parts that have been cut out. In this way, her personal story becomes everyone's story.
Katrien de Blauwer is a neutral intermediary: without being the author of the photographs, she makes them her own and integrates them into her own inner world, a world she reveals in the third person.
Her work is therefore essentially about memory. Memory by accumulation rather than subtraction.
For the first time, after a presentation at the Musée des Le Locle (Switzerland) by Nathalie Herschdorfer, she presents Isabelle is 24 years old ... Isabelle a 42 ans, a work in which she develops two two parallel stories in which two moments of life are revealed. The artist
cuts, disfigures the published photograph, glues it, sometimes adds a trace of paint and reveals a story with a disturbing atmosphere
like something out of a film noir.
After studying painting in Ghent, Katrien de Blauwer studied fashion for two years in Antwerp at the Royal Academy before starting to work on her first collage books. Her work has been the subject of numerous and group exhibitions around the world: Nederlands Foto Museum (Rotterdam) Untitled Art (Miami), Les rencontres d'Arles (France), In cadaqués (Spain), The Photography Show by AIPAD (New York), POST Gallery (Tokyo), Le Château d 'eau (Toulouse), Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle (Switzerland).
Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire
The Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire opened its doors in 1996 in the Marais in an industrial building of 300m2 on two levels sheltered by a large
a large glass roof. The gallery's programme brings together all the fields of contemporary art, which intersect and enrich each other, with established and emerging artists often call upon a plural writing.
It is political in the noble sense of the word through its obstinate exploration of the world and the search for what underlies it. The gallery participates actively in fairs and exhibitions and collaborates with numerous institutions in France and abroad. It has produced a large number of publications, alone or in co-production, which are a privileged tool for the diffusion of creation.
Galerie Les Filles du calvaire, 17 rue des Filles du Calvaire — 75003 Paris, France.
