Background
Ethnicity:
Claudette Schreuders’s parents came from the Netherlands.
Claudette Schreuders was born on February 6, 1973, in Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa.
2016
Claudette Schreuders at the undergraduate seminar of an Igbo-Nigerian artist Chika Okeke-Agulu "Art and Politics in Postcolonial Africa" in 2016. Photo by Chika Okeke-Agulu.
Claudette Schreuders working on her drawings and lithographs.
University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch Central, Stellenbosch, Western Cape, South Africa
The University of Stellenbosch where Claudette Schreuders obtained her Bachelor of Arts degree in 1994.
University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, Cape Town, 7700, South Africa
The view of the Upper Campus of the University of Cape Town in which Michaelis School of Fine Art Claudette Schreuders received her Master of Arts degree in 1998.
Claudette Schreuders in a studio working on her lithography.
1550 S El Camino Real, Encinitas, CA 92024, United States
Claudette Schreuders near a sculpture of her mother at the Lux Art Institute in California. Photo by Charlie Neuman.
Claudette Schreuders with one of her wood carvings.
Ethnicity:
Claudette Schreuders’s parents came from the Netherlands.
Claudette Schreuders was born on February 6, 1973, in Pretoria, Gauteng, South Africa.
An adolescent, Claudette Schreuders witnessed the period when the apartheid approached its end in 1994.
Schreuders received her secondary education at Linden High School in Johannesburg, South Africa graduating in 1990. Then, she attended the University of Stellenbosch which provided her with a Bachelor of Fine Arts four years later. Then, Schreuders pursued her studies at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town where she obtained her Master of Fine Arts degree with distinction in 1997.
Claudette Schreuders began her career at the end of the 20th century. So, her works were exhibited for the first time in 1998 at a show titled Family Tree which coincided with her first public commission titled ‘Thomas’ for Aga Kahn Walk City Square in Nairobi, Kenya where she lived at the moment. The following year, Schreuders took part at the Liberated Voices exhibition at the Museum for African Art in New York City.
It was also at the turn of the century when Schreuders tried her hand in academics. So, from 1999 to 2000, she taught Sculpture at the University of Pretoria, and later, in 1997, served as a part-time drawing lecturer at the University of Cape Town.
Early in her career, the artist dealt primary with wood carving but gradually also adopted bronze sculptures, lithographic prints, etchings, and drawings. The debut solo exhibition of Schreuder's art, ‘The Long Day: Sculpture by Claudette Schreuders’, traveled around the United States from 2004 to 2005. The same year, Schreuders worked on four life-size bronze sculptures of South Africa's Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Albert Luthuli and F.W. de Klerk for the Nobel Square in Cape Town.
Claudette Schreuders’s has exhibited throughout South Africa and around the world, including Klein Karoo National Arts Festival in Oudtshoorn, Stevenson Gallery in Johannesburg, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, Smithsonian Institution in Washington D. C., the British Museum in London, and Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery in Japan among others. One of her recent solo exhibitions is 2019 ‘Claudette Schreuders: In the Bedroom’ at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City. The gallery has been the representative of Schreuders’s art since 2001.
Nowadays, Claudette Schreuders lives and works in her native city, Cape Town, South Africa.
Many of sculptures made by Claudette Schreuders often have an autobiographical undertone. Her figures are somehow the reflection of the different period of her own life, from her student years to the birth of her first-born.
Another topic typical for Schreuders is everyday South African life which she reflects through the combination of South Africa's colonial past and her personal attitude to the history of the country.
Quotations:
"The human figure is quite easy to identify with and become sentimental about. So I avoid images that are too comfortable or familiar."
"I enjoy art in which you can see the life where it comes from. Art that is solely about art is not as attractive to me as when there is life outside the work."
"[The colon figures] were crucial to me in how I wanted my sculptures to look."
"I think what I'm interested in is telling stories. It's portraiture, but it's a vehicle for telling a particular story, or the way in which society makes people who they are, or the group against the individual. As soon as you make a figure, it has an identity, and it's immediately a white person or a black person."
"It's interesting for me to look at portraiture as something where you try and make a person with the idea you have of them, and try and bring in abstract elements, like in African art where they say 'this is a beautiful person because he [sic] is complete.' So I am interested in making things that are beautiful, and how beauty works."
Claudette Schreuders considers herself as a perfectionist. She carefully works on each figure trying to understand the nature of it.
Schreuders’s favorite material for her sculptures is wood jacaranda.
Quotes from others about the person
"[Schreuders's work] proposes a new language resulting from a synthesis of African and European figural forms." Okwui Enwezor, art critic, author, art history educator