Claudette Schreuders / Sculpture meets screen print
The highly accomplished artist Claudette Schreuders found global acclaim during the earliest years of her career. Just two years after completing her master’s degree, she was selected by New York’s Museum for African Art to participate in Liberated Voices: Contemporary Art from South Africa, which travelled the USA. And just two years after that, in 2001, she held a solo show in New York at the Jack Shainman Gallery, who has represented her ever since.
She’s renowned for her arresting wooden sculptures, among which hang her limited edition fine art prints – works on paper that began as a means of documenting her sculptures.
Schreuders explains: “My first series of etchings was a record of some of my favourite existing sculpture. And after that I decided what I would like to do is to keep a record of my own work, seeing as it’s something that leaves me.”
The prints connect with the sculptures beyond the direct reference; the sense of isolating, overwhelming space that characterises her sculptural installations is evoked on paper by the figures’ detached placement in the surrounds of white space.
Today her prints are predominantly lithographs, so an opportunity to create a screen print edition offered exciting new territory for Schreuders, in discovering what this particular printmaking discipline would bring to her practice. And, of course, we were thrilled to work with this accomplished artist. The collaboration worked so well that we produced two artworks: “Mr Right” and “The end”. They epitomise the brilliance she’s known for – that potent mix of dark humour, ambiguity and domestic–political goings-on – now outworked in the one-of-a-kind medium of screen print.
Both of these new releases are limited editions of just 35, and because Schreuders’s work is in high demand, we’re offering first access to interested buyers via sign-up.
Email us (info@50ty50typrints.com) to register your interest and get first access.
The End (2019) painted bronze | The End (2021) screen print limited edition of 35, 28x38cm.
CLAUDETTE SCHREUDERS / BIOGRAPHY
Claudette Schreuders (b. 1973) is a sculptor and printmaker best known for her wood-carved and painted figures: short, stout, reserved, deadpan; born of personal–political experiences and usually engaged in private, everyday acts. Domestic sketches play out in the public arena, now dislocated and recontextualised in a sculptural installation where the relational dynamics between individual characters charge the gallery space. Schreuders elaborates: “… I think of a group and how the relationship between each individual would suggest a narrative … a potential to be interpreted in a certain way … I try to keep it quite open.” This deliberate open-endedness reflects ambiguities of identity, particularly in a post-Apartheid South Africa, and elicits from the viewer a projection of their own meaning onto the work. Ambiguity is further entrenched by her visual sources: she draws from confluences of African and European art traditions – from medieval religious art to West African colon figures, from Spanish portraiture to Egyptian woodcarving.
Schreuders has enjoyed international acclaim since the earliest years of her career, with numerous solo shows in the USA, including a travelling museum exhibition; five solos at the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, where she’s been represented since 2001; and another at the LUX Art Institute in California. She’s participated in notable group exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), the Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.), the British Museum (London) and at galleries throughout Continental Europe and Scandinavia and in the UK, Kenya and Japan. Her work is held in prominent collections in South Africa and the USA, including New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art. Schreuders was also commissioned to create a permanent public outdoor sculpture of South Africa’s Nobel Peace Prize Laureates.
