Painted Scenes 26

Katrien de Blauwer is a Belgian artist, born in 1969 in the small town of Ronse and best known for her photo collages and books. Our first introduction to her work came as a result of her inclusion in the 10x10 women’s book project that the MFA hosted in 2019 and subsequent viewing of the original collages at Paris Photo. De Blauwer studied art in Ghent and fashion in Antwerp and jokes that she never got past the “mood board” stage of her training, because she was so drawn to the cutting and combining of magazine imagery that it required. Her love of collecting and recycling printed pictures has led her to describe herself as a “photographer without a camera” and to claim of the collages: “I need to make them like I need to breathe.” Many of her black-and-white, mostly female subjects are drawn from French and Italian fashion magazines dating to the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, and she is greatly inspired by the sensuality and voyeuristic qualities of New Wave films like “Blow Up” (1964) by Michelangelo Antonioni. De Blauwer often pairs contrasting fragments or spliced figures in her small Janus-like arrangements, sometimes even adding faded colored papers or slashes of paint, that suggest the layers and fragments of human memory, as well as the “jump cuts” employed by film editors. As a result, she has come to think of the cut of her scissors (or knife) as akin to the “click” of the camera shutter and to see photo collage as the ideal medium to represent her own personal history, private thoughts, and feelings of estrangement and alienation.