Claudette Schreuders

Claudette Schreuders (born February 6, 1973) is a South African sculptor and painter operating out of Cape Town, South Africa. She is known mainly for her carved and painted wooden figures, which have been exhibited independently and internationally in galleries and museums. She is the first South African artist to have a sculpture acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Schreuders has been a finalist for both the Daimler Chrysler Award (South Africa) and the FNB Vita Art Prize (South Africa), which is South Africa's version of the Turner Prize. She is first-generation South African born to Dutch parents. Schreuders' adolescence was during the period leading up to the end of apartheid in 1994.

She attended Linden High School in Johannesburg and graduated in 1990.

Career Schreuders began exhibiting her work in 1998, with a show titled Family Tree. Her earliest bodies of work were Burnt by the Sun (2001), Crying in Public (2002), The Long Day (2004), and The Fall (2007).

Her work has been shown in the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, the Nobel Peace Center, the British Museum, and the Fowler Museum at the University of California, Los Angeles. and William Kentridge. It has also been described as an "exploration of self-identity, cultural discomfort and a strong if clouded spirituality" and the depiction of figures who appear "monolithic, stoic and timeless" and "the malleability of an African identity in the wake of apartheid." Art critic Okwui Enwezor has said that her work "proposes a new language resulting from a synthesis of African and European figural forms."

Her wooden figures rarely deviate from what Schreuders has established as her personal style. First, her work is often autobiographical. Her first six bodies of work represented different phases of her life: her graduate show reflected her life as a student; her second collection reflected her time in residencies in foreign countries; her third reflected on the reception of her work, and the following works concerned the birth of her first child and domestic life. Second, the bodies are "stocky figures with slightly oversized heads and hands, carved in wood and rendered with enamel paint." Third, her work has "small solitary figures with the aura of invisible or indeterminate narrative silences [and] generally expressionless faces that mask any overt or strong feelings." Fourth, her depictions of everyday South African life comment on the residue of South Africa's colonial past and her own relationship with South African history. For instance, one sculpture is of "a black woman with a white child on her back" and "the child is built up out of cuts, as if the child is going to fall apart into slices the moment the woman unties the blanket." Fifth her figures often have "vacant stares" and a "rigidity, even paralysis of movement" communicating that "all is not what it seems."

Influences Her wood carved statues often begin from a single piece of wood, akin to traditional African art practices, especially the West African colon statues and Baule Blolo sculptures native to the Ivory Coast. Colon sculptures originated as figures for indigenous rituals, but as decolonization infiltrated African society Europeans began having them commissioned as portraits of themselves. Christopher Steiner explains the importance of colon figures as a "symbol of social status ... [whose] very ownership by a Western signifies the reappropriation of Africa and is thus prized as an image that pays homage to the conquest of the continent." Schreuders has stated that the colon figures "were crucial to me in how I wanted my sculptures to look" due to their living quality.

Exhibits and Residences

+Notable CollectionsCollectionPlaceDaimlerChrysler Art CollectionBerlin, GermanyIziko South African National GalleryCape Town, South AfricaJohannesburg Art GalleryJohannesburg, South AfricaMetropolitan MuseumNew York, USAMichaelis School of Fine ArtUniversity of Cape Town, South AfricaMuseum of Modern ArtNew York, USAParliament of South AfricaCape Town, South AfricaRBC Dann Rauscher Art CollectionMinneapolis, USA