Katrien De Blauwer

Katrien de Blauwer was born in the small provincial town of Ronse (Belgium). 

After a difficult childhood, she moved to Ghent at a very young age to study painting. Later, she enrolled at the Royal Academy of Antwerp to study fashion, a program she eventually abandoned. It was during this time that she created her first collage books, which were actually studies and inspiration journals for fashion collections. Later, she began collecting, cutting out, and recycling images as part of a therapeutic process of self-reflection.

Katrien De Blauwer describes herself as a “photographer without a camera.” 

She collects and recycles images and photographs from old magazines and newspapers. Her work is both intimate—speaking directly to our unconscious—and anonymous, thanks to her use of found images and cut-out body parts. In this way, her personal story becomes everyone’s story. The collage creates a kind of universalization, highlighting the impossibility of identifying with a single individual, while still allowing viewers to recognize themselves in the story. The artist becomes a neutral intermediary: without being the author of the photographs, she appropriates them and integrates them into her own inner world—a world she reveals in the third person.

Katrien De Blauwer gives new meaning and new life to what is left behind, saving images from destruction and weaving them into a new narrative that blends intimacy and anonymity. Her work, therefore, focuses primarily on memory. A memory built through accumulation rather than subtraction. Her work evokes the techniques of photomontage or film editing. Here, cropping is used as a frame that highlights what is essential.

Text excerpted from Katrien De Blauwer's website