Cecile Van Hanja

www.cecilevanhanja.com

In urban environments we are inundated daily with information and hectic impressions. Cecile Van Hanja seeks a balance between this outer city life and her private world.

In her studio she creates the tranquillity she needs to be in direct contact with herself. Studio space is a recurring motif in her oeuvre, painting. It is a starting point and workplace: the occasion, site and dimension of her investigations. When she is working on a project she goes out into urban spaces, photographs architecture and the transforms those images into paintings, altering colour, light and atmosphere.

Corridors, rooms or staircases, she leaves the architectural spaces remarkably empty. The images are filled with emptiness. She is fascinated by airless and lifeless neutrality of space like airport, hotel rooms and offices, biological homes for a while.

Originally she explored the habitat of these temporary homes, rendering the private world visible and accessible to outsiders. Recently she has moved to the inside world to the facades, emphasizing architecture as a sort of alienation between people in our modern society in which people do not know their neighbours, poverty of contact between people.  

 

Exhibited at Griffin Gallery in Saatchi Art’s Showdown: In Glorious Colour in April 2014.

 

BORN

Corsica, France

EDUCATION

University for the Arts - Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 1993

BA French Literatue - University of Amsterdam (U.V.A), 1991

Mastersdegree - Visual Arts, 1989

(Last updated 14.11.2014)

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