Claudette SCHREUDERS (b. 1973)

BIOGRAPHY

Born in Pretoria, Claudette Schreuders is a South African sculptor whose diminutive figures in carved and painted wood reflect the ambiguities of the search for an ‘African’ identity in the post-apartheid era. She derives her inspiration from a number of sources including medieval church figures, West African carving and Spanish portraiture.

Narratives are essential to Schreuders. Through her stories, she makes public that which is private. In Autobiography of Complexity by Rory Bester, Schreuders reveals, ‘The human figure is quite easy to identify with and become sentimental about. So I avoid images that are too comfortable or familiar.’

Schreuders lives and works in Cape Town, where she graduated with an MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1998. She was part of the Liberated Voices exhibition at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1999.

From 2004 – 2005, her first solo museum exhibition toured the United States.

In 2011, she had a solo exhibition at the LUX Art Institute in California. She has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), Since 2000: Printmaking Now, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006), and Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York (2004).

Solo exhibitions with Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City include In the Bedroom (2019), Note to Self (2016), Close, Close (2011), The Fall (2007), and Crying in Public (2002).

SOURCE
‘Claudette Schreuders,’ Jack Shainman Gallery, https://jackshainman.com/artists/claudette_schreuders.