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. Through her deeply technical and meditative craftsmanship, Maja constructs an enhanced, edited reality. Her work addresses real places and memories and then casts a veil over them — at best an act of preservation, and at worst, of neutralization. She disguises key referents, perhaps in observation of our collective willingness to lean into fantasy when it provides comfort.
Typical for Klaassen's practice is her ongoing series of grass paintings. These paintings have been executed as if writing, concentrated at a desk, in a focussed, detailed, and intimate working process. The grass paintings too are missing vital information. For some viewers the works may seem sensual, some may see the remnants of a picnic, the impression of a sleeping animal, a boat, a tent, or the aftermath of violence. Their simplicity is ambiguous, and even though they appear quite realistic, the lushness, greenness, and uniformity makes them somehow unreal.
Hyper-realistic disembodied rose thorns are another recurring motif, each individually hand sculpted and painted by the artist. They function as a fluid metaphor for both romance and protection, departing from literary tropes of innocence and purity into something more sinister. The thorns seem to have found their own place as weeds do in a garden, posing a small threat while exposing themselves to the risk of being plucked. Thorns can act as both a fragment and a pars pro toto, as what is missing continues to exist as a kind of ghost. Formally and figuratively they are representative of the “tip of the iceberg.” To Klaassens, this is the same as how experiences remain as ghosts behind the fragments we extract from them and form into memories.
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 Gallery 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.
Typical for Klaassen's practice is her ongoing series of grass paintings. These paintings have been executed as if writing, concentrated at a desk, in a focussed, detailed, and intimate working process. The grass paintings too are missing vital information. For some viewers the works may seem sensual, some may see the remnants of a picnic, the impression of a sleeping animal, a boat, a tent, or the aftermath of violence. Their simplicity is ambiguous, and even though they appear quite realistic, the lushness, greenness, and uniformity makes them somehow unreal.
Hyper-realistic disembodied rose thorns are another recurring motif, each individually hand sculpted and painted by the artist. They function as a fluid metaphor for both romance and protection, departing from literary tropes of innocence and purity into something more sinister. The thorns seem to have found their own place as weeds do in a garden, posing a small threat while exposing themselves to the risk of being plucked. Thorns can act as both a fragment and a pars pro toto, as what is missing continues to exist as a kind of ghost. Formally and figuratively they are representative of the “tip of the iceberg.” To Klaassens, this is the same as how experiences remain as ghosts behind the fragments we extract from them and form into memories.
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 Gallery 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.