Fleur van Dodewaard Dutch, b. 1983

Fleur van Dodewaard (b. 1983, Haarlem, the Netherlands) lives and works in Amsterdam. Her oeuvre encompasses drawing, painting and sculpture, photography and ceramics. Using simple, often found or previously used materials — such as wooden slats, wire and small stones — she constructs composite objects that she balances in space or ties together and hangs on the wall. Her drawings, frequently no more than a few lines on a sheet of paper, display the same playful essentiality.

For Van Dodewaard, making her work is an exercise in life itself. An exercise in being fully present, wherever you are. Working with one's hands, in dialogue with the material — by continually adding something, scraping it away again, turning it over, lifting it, pressing into it or folding it — grants direct access to that state of being.

She describes her work as 'an exercise in preserving lightness, in experiencing intense pleasure, and in training a flexible mind, always open to an emerging new possibility and reality'. Work regularly comes into being in a particular place outside her Amsterdam studio, elsewhere in the world — in Japan or France, for instance, where she draws inspiration from elements of the local culture and art-historical context.

Van Dodewaard was educated at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the University of Amsterdam. She has also spent much of her life travelling the world alone, something she calls her 'school of life'. Her work has been exhibited internationally, from Japan to the United States, Australia, China, and in numerous locations across Europe. It is held in several public art collections, including the Frans Hals Museum, the Kröller-Müller Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in Arnhem. She has also received a number of prestigious grants from, amongst others, the Mondriaan Fund, the Cultuurfonds and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts.