Katrien de Blauwer was born in the small provincial town of Ronse (Belgium) in 1969. After a troubled childhood, she moved to Ghent at a young age to study painting. Later she attended the Royal Academy in Antwerp to study fashion. A study she abandoned. It was at that time she made her first collage books, actually studies and moodbooks for fashion collections. At a later age she began collecting, cutting and recycling images as therapeutic self investigation.

The collages of Katrien De Blauwer flirt with fashion, dance, cinema, and photography. Some call her a “photographer without a camera”. Others would define her work as “post-photography ”. Using magazine images, her work is all about recollection. Like a photographer, De Blauwer cuts/reframes images, pasting them together with others, or with monochrome strips from the same magazines. This process is a spontaneous one, kindred to the methods of a painter as well. While creating, De Blauwer uses different paleמּes with limbs, still lifes, dark tones, colours... She applies her old and worn materials very sparingly, thus producing precious and fragile pieces of art, that are, moreover, of an exceptional openness and appeal. 

The viewer enters into a sensual, ambiguous but nonetheless clean-cut atmosphere that reminds us of the typical atmosphere in film noir or nouvelle-vague cinema. The artist’s indebtedness to photography and cinema is indisputable. Recurring titles, such as ‚Jump Cuts’ or ‚Dark Scenes’, clearly hint at cinematic language. De Blauwer, scissors and glue in hand, keeps us wondering about what is going on exactly.