CLAUDIE DE CLEEN

PEOPLEText: Bastiaan Rijkers

I’ve known her work for quite a while now and I have always been triggered by all the quirky opinions, images and drawings that have been popping up everywhere and nowhere. Nowadays there’s quite a few drawing artists, only few however actually make the difference, Claudie de Cleen certainly is one of them.

Her home/atelier looks as if a bomb exploded, paper, faxes, samples, cd’s, photographs, pencils, sketches, and what not all over the place. She is preparing for an exposition at ‘The Bakery’ from gallery Annet Gelink, which explains part of the chaos. By now everything is tidy again she has reassured me.

Claudie started at the Rietveld academy here in Amsterdam, from her 17th until her 22nd she studied graphic design. After this she was accepted at the Jan van Eyck academy in Maastricht, here she struggled to overcome all the influences of her former Rietveld teachers to become her real self. Finally she did one year of the Amsterdam art directors course ‘Hallo’, which she completed successfully.

After an internship at KesselsKramer she decided art direction was not ideal for her. Claudie didn’t like advertising because of the strictly defined concepts, the client conflicts and stupid products. But mostly she just wants to make things herself. To create she loves to collaborate with others, to find obscure photography (like her useful photography book project), to exchange, to make collages and so on. Claudie wants to be ‘hands on’ when making her creations, to be in control of the output. Big ideas often portrayed in small intimate ways.

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