MARCELLE HANSELAAR | ‘THE INNER AND THE OUTER’
Trophy wife, 2006, oil on canvas, 80 x 70 cm, courtesy of Julian Page‘The magic of painting’, states the London-based Dutch artist Marcelle Hanselaar, in a recent interview with FAD Magazine, ‘is that you can show the inner and the outer, the suggestive or the interpretative, on the same plane’.
Hanselaar is a self-taught painter, who over the last 40 years has produced a prolific output of otherworldly, often rather brutal dreamscapes from the studio where she works and lives, in North London. Common subjects include vulnerable-yet-savage women, and animals: notably dogs, rabbits, wolves and monkeys. Her humans often become animals and her animals become humans: there are frequently sexual relations between the two. Artist Nan Mulder calls these creatures ‘her [Hanselaar’s] props in the theatre of the absurd’. It isn’t a surprise to learn that the artist is no stranger to the psychoanalyst’s couch: these are paintings that lend themselves to Freudian interpretation.
Her work has often been compared with that of Paula Rego, but there’s much more in it than that. There’s a bit of Bacon, a bit of Armitage, a bit of Brueghel, a bit of Velasquez in there, too. And a lot of Max Beckmann, the German Expressionist (though he rejected that term) who she has often cited as a major influence.
The work above, courtesy of Julian Page, typifies the dark humour in the artist’s work. Part of a series of single female figures produced in the 2000s, it is entitled Trophy Wife. Whether that refers to the poor monkey or the grimacing woman isn’t clear (or, more to the point, consciously ambivalent). Does the painting refer back to Orpheus and the Thracian girl? Salomé and John the Baptist? Is there a message of female martyrdom in there, somewhere? Is the woman expressing sorrow, or disgust?
Only the artist knows. If she knows.
Julian Page will be showing this work (from 2006) and several others by Hanselaar, alongside pieces by Frank Auerbach, Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Alexander Massouras, Kate McCrickard, Eduardo Paolozzi, Paula Rego, Bridget Riley and James Rogers at Stand 20 of British Art Fair.