SELF-PORTRAIT: KATRIEN DE BLAUWER WRITER: TOM SEYMOUR

ver since I was a child, there was a voice inside me

that told me I was not like the rest,’ says Katrien De

Blauwer. She’s speaking from her studio in Antwerp,

a hidden room in a small apartment she shares with

her husband Serge. It’s her ‘safe space’. One side is piled

high with magazines, unfinished work, paper and

cardboard. Her desk is an old wooden bureau filled

with notebooks, pencils and fragments of more

magazines. The remaining walls are covered with a

mosaic of images that have, in some way, spoken to her.

She spends every day here, creating collages that give

new life and expression to images that would otherwise

lie discarded and forgotten. ‘It’s a daily obsession,’

she says. ‘I need to make them like I need to breathe.’

For Wallpaper*, De Blauwer collaborated with

photographer Esther Theaker and fashion director

Isabelle Kountoure to create a special series of works

for our fashion story, seen on the previous pages,

as well as the limited-edition cover for this issue.

This October sees the launch of a De Blauwer

retrospective at Ffotogallery in the Welsh seaside town

of Penarth, curated by the gallery’s director, David

Drake. Talking her into her first solo exhibition in the

UK was not as easy as it sounds, he says: ‘De Blauwer

is a very private person. She’s produced artworks on an

almost daily basis for more than 20 years, but only

recently has she begun to share and exhibit her work.’

She describes herself as ‘a photographer without a

camera’, using found and archival photography to

create suggestive visual metaphors, ones that reflect

‘my own subconscious as it bubbles to the surface’.

During our interview, De Blauwer speaks, without

prompting, of her troubled childhood. ‘I was born

in a small, sleepy town,’ she says. ‘There was nothing

to do.’ She grew up in Ronce in Flanders, near Belgium’s

border with France. She was raised by her ageing

grandparents and saw very little of her parents.

‘There was no time or place for art,’ she recalls. Later,

in her teenage years, ‘another lady took care of me,

but then she got sick and I had to take care of her.

So again, no time for art.’

Her father’s absence left a mark – it’s maybe why

her images are almost totally devoid of the male figure.

‘I focus on women because I was always surrounded

by women,’ she says. ‘When I was a little girl, I missed

my father a lot. I’m a woman, so I understand a

woman’s body. Men are absent in my work because

they were absent when I was young.’

As a teenager, she took to cutting out images she

spotted in the books or magazines she came across,

keeping them in private diaries in her bedroom.

‘They were tiny little magazine fragments,’ she says.

‘Very naïve and very girlish.’ At 18, she moved to

Ghent to study painting, then on to the Royal Academy

in Antwerp to study fashion. The course required

students to create mood-books for fashion collections.

De Blauwer discovered she was ‘very bad with patterns

and making clothes’, but naturally skilled in collaging

together disparate and residual images. Placed together

and skilfully cut in the right way, and with blocks of

colour adding new tonal multivalence, a new narrative

would suddenly emerge – not unlike the metamorphosis

that takes place in a dark room.

As she further explored collage, De Blauwer found

she could corral images of the female body – their

faces rarely visible – and express the emotions she was

experiencing. ‘My art became my therapy,’ she says.

‘It confronted me with myself.’ She’s fond of the quote

by the writer Anaïs Nin: ‘We don’t see things as they

are, we see them as we are.’

There’s a paradox here. The images she uses are not

her own, even as they reflect who she is. ‘My work is

very intimate,’ says De Blauwer. ‘It comes from my

inner world and asks questions about my personal life,

my body, my sexuality. But, at the same time, it’s

anonymous. I’m using images I have found. I did not

make them, but I’m giving them a new meaning.’

She recently watched, for the first time, Une Femme

Mariée, Jean-Luc Godard’s portrayal of a married

woman having an affair. De Blauwer saw something

recognisable in the film without at first being able to

identify it. On reviewing her older work, she realised

she had used stills from the film without being aware

of the connection. The discovery delighted her. ‘I want

my images to be anonymous,’ she says. ‘I take stories

from others. By cutting away faces, my personal story

becomes everybody’s story.’

Drake’s exhibition at Ffotogallery will include

work from all stages of De Blauwer’s career, from

her earliest notebooks to her newest works, in which

she has introduced elements of painting alongside

photography. ‘The almost daily routine of making new

works is essential for Katrien’s well-being,’ Drake says.

‘She has a unique way of using juxtapositions and

compositional elements to create emotional and

intuitive art. There’s a melancholic undertow to some

of the work, but there’s also humour, sensuality and

poetry and, at times a hint of aggression, too.’ ∂

‘Katrien De Blauwer: Retrospective’, curated by David Drake

with Charlotte Boudon, Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris,

is at Ffotogallery, Penarth, from 26 October-9 December,

ffotogallery.org ; katriendeblauwer.com

KATRIEN DE BLAUWER’S

ORIGINAL ARTWORK FOR

OUR LIMITED-EDITION COVER

(AVAILABLE TO SUBSCRIBERS,

SEE WALLPAPER.COM). SEE

PAGES 178-191 FOR MORE

OF HER COLLAGED WORKS,

CREATED SPECIALLY FOR

THIS ISSUE OF WALLPAPER*

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Agenda