2022 participant 36 Vase Parade; May 8 - July 2 at Terra Delft Gallery
Babs Haenen is an artist working with clay and specializing in porcelain. Born in the Netherlands, she graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam in 1979. Since then, her works have made it into the permanent collections of top-tier galleries and museums such as the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Cooper-Hewitt Museum and The MET Museumin New York, and many more around the globe. From 2010 to 2018, she was partly living in Jingdezhen, China, where she had the opportunity to come into contact with this very faraway and fascinating culture.
The ceramic work of artist Babs Haenen is typified by expressive and impressionistic qualities where colour, line and form all play an equal part. The painterly way in which she adorns her vessels demonstrates the way in which abstract painting inspires her; landscape motifs, such as rippling water, are recurring themes as well.
"Because I was a dancer and didn't enter the profession until I was 27, movement is very important, but also touch. I work with white porcelain so I can make any color I want. When I saw, for example, the paintings by Rothko, I developed a special technique to be able to fade one color into another with no sharp lines, but shading them away.”
