Reineke Hollander is a Dutch-American Artist who grew up in the Netherlands but has lived in New York City since 1986. Since 2015 she has divided her time between NYC and Marseille, France. Hollander trained as a painter at Art Academies in The Hague and Amsterdam and by interning with artists, like the Swiss-Dutch painter Paul Husner. A long-term grant from The Municipality of Amsterdam helped her establish herself as a professional artist. A brief career as a theatrical costume designer provided the genesis of her love for fabrics and sewing. Traveling to “other places” is an ongoing source of her inspiration. Within repeating themes such as ‘Memory’, ‘The Passage of Time’, ‘Language’, ‘The Horrors of War’, separate pieces are informed- emotionally, politically and by locally found materials-by residencies or long-time studios in far-flung locations, including Tanzania, Israel, Poland, New Mexico and most recently Marseille. Her work is found in numerous public and private collections in the Netherlands, the USA, France and Israel. Most recently it has been published in “American Craft” Magazine. She has widely exhibited in the USA and Europe.
Full CV on request.
My main concern in my work --textiles, paintings, mixed media and sculptures-- is “What is Lost, or Thrown Away”: lost Time, lost Memories. I collect discarded objects, vintage and/or ethnic fabrics and vintage photographs (especially of people, those pictures that were proudly shown off in homes, then, in a next generation, ended up in boxes and attics and eventually show up in flea markets and bric a brac stores). I feel compelled to rescue their attached memories and stories, however remote, and to preserve, enhance and contextualize them into new entities.
Like an archeologist I excavate fragments of the past and try to discern a narrative from them. Shards become “wholes,” not as something that once was whole in the past, like an antique vase, but as new forms in the present whose meaning is symbolic or allegoric.
An image from a documentary about the Netherlands in World War II has stuck in my mind: Silent rows of Jews are walking on their way to the Central Railway Station in Amsterdam. They carry bundles and suitcases with the belongings that they were allowed to take by the Germans, the bare necessities. Not being able to rescue these people, I concentrate on: what was left in their suitcases? For that matter, what was in the suitcase of Walter Benjamin which was lost or stolen when he tried to flee from the nazis over the Pyrenees to Spain? What did the immigrants who are drowning in the Mediterranee leave behind?
What might not be possible to express in words, might be expressed in a fragment of cloth, a photograph.
Process plays an important part in my work. It involves collecting, sewing, wrapping, cutting, wiping and scratching, covering, knotting, connecting, nailing, piercing, weaving; a meditative, accumulative stream of actions that inform the finished work. In my paintings, though seemingly mostly abstract, all the shapes, lines and marks represent something real. Shapes and colours are getting introduced and painted over, actions that keep being repeated -- much an imitation of the process of remembering and forgetting -- until the painting becomes “the whole story.”
An -- albeit dyslexic -- archeologist, a mourning descendant and bystander; these personae come together in my practice as an artist.