Maja Klaassens

New Zealand born Maja Klaassens is a multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture, photography, painting, video, and text. Her work explores the ways narrative techniques used in film and literature influence our experiences, memories, and perceptions of place. Adopting literary devices and a heightened attention to detail, her practice is grounded in the persistent study of editing.

 

Typical for Klaassens’ practice is her ongoing series of grass paintings. In these works, blades of grass painted with single brushstrokes form intimate stories like words on a page. Through variations in tone and composition, each painting becomes its own distinct world. Ambiguous impressions left behind in the grass point toward the incomplete — for every viewer traces of a different subject or event. Their simplicity is deceptive, and even though they appear realistic, their lushness, greenness, and uniformity makes them somehow unreal.

 

Other motifs like rose thorns, dorsal fins, and water droplets reoccur across her works. Each can act as both a fragment and a pars pro toto, as what is missing continues to exist as a ghost. These incomplete images, lifted by the artist from literary nature tropes and their contemporary reverberations, trace romanticised narratives we construct individually and collectively about place.

 

Maja Klaassens (1989, New Zealand) obtained her BFA from the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague in 2014, and her MA in Contemporary Art History from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2021. Recent solo and duo exhibitions include ’The view is total sea’ at Joys in Toronto, Canada, 'Niek Kemps & Maja Klaassens’ at lxhxb in Eindhoven, Netherlands and ‘Orca’ at Dürst Britt & Mayhew. Recent group exhibitions include ‘Mountain Friends’ at Fred & Ferry in Antwerp, Belgium, ‘After Daan van Golden’ at Parts Project and ‘RSVP’ at Billytown, both in The Hague, Netherlands.