Anne Francien
van den Berg
Haarlem, The Netherlands 2002
Anne Francien (2002) grew up on the intersection of metropolitan life and farmlands around Amsterdam, enjoying the insights into animal care and agricultural labour since her early years, which remain an inspiration to her practice.
Currently, she works under the persona of a Polderschilder: a metaphorical and conceptual framework following the artificial transmutation of water to land. “To Polder” is to enable a fluidity of narratives. Through shaping, draining, and reframing, her paintings amplify the depictions of landscapes, bodies and the disjunction between them. Thus, she draws closely from speculative nature practices, intersectional feminism and queer imaginations.
With a background in conceptual art at the Base for Experimentation and Artistic Research (BEAR) and fine art at ArtEZ, she studied art both interdisciplinary and theoretically. Anne Francien is driven by notions of the (female) body and the devices used to (re)frame its entrapment within Western aesthetic and political dogmas. In multimedia oil paintings, figurative images spectrally resurface on canvases, skin and expand through space and raw materials.
Through representation, she asks the audience to challenge the traditional notion of “untouched wilderness” and wonder how landscapes and their boundaries are constructed in relation to the modern management of bodies. Is skin a landscape? And does framing and hanging become a murder scene?
Recently, Anne’s developments integrating concrete into a painterly practice furthers the duality of muddy soil as the building blocks of modern city architecture. Embodying the drained and fragmented polder entity connects the process of painting to the speculative (de)construction of the Dutch structural, natural, and political landscape.
Currently, she works under the persona of a Polderschilder: a metaphorical and conceptual framework following the artificial transmutation of water to land. “To Polder” is to enable a fluidity of narratives. Through shaping, draining, and reframing, her paintings amplify the depictions of landscapes, bodies and the disjunction between them. Thus, she draws closely from speculative nature practices, intersectional feminism and queer imaginations.
With a background in conceptual art at the Base for Experimentation and Artistic Research (BEAR) and fine art at ArtEZ, she studied art both interdisciplinary and theoretically. Anne Francien is driven by notions of the (female) body and the devices used to (re)frame its entrapment within Western aesthetic and political dogmas. In multimedia oil paintings, figurative images spectrally resurface on canvases, skin and expand through space and raw materials.
Through representation, she asks the audience to challenge the traditional notion of “untouched wilderness” and wonder how landscapes and their boundaries are constructed in relation to the modern management of bodies. Is skin a landscape? And does framing and hanging become a murder scene?
Recently, Anne’s developments integrating concrete into a painterly practice furthers the duality of muddy soil as the building blocks of modern city architecture. Embodying the drained and fragmented polder entity connects the process of painting to the speculative (de)construction of the Dutch structural, natural, and political landscape.