Babs Haenen
Dutch ceramist Babs Haenen was born in Amsterdam in 1948 in the Netherlands. She is a world-renowned artist famous for her biomorphic ceramics, which are often described as expressive and impressionistic, wild and full of motion. Haenen was a professional dancer before joining the Gerrit Rietvleld Academy, where she studied from 1974 to 1979 with Geert Lap, Barbara Nanning and Paulus van Leeuwen. She later returned to teach at the Academy for 19 years.
As Haenen remembers, in the beginning, her work was found wild and frankly odd, especially domestically. The ceramic work of Haenen is typified by expressive and impressionistic qualities where colour, line and form all play an equal part. The painterly way in which she adorns her vessels demonstrates the way in which abstract painting inspires her; landscape motifs, such as rippling water, are recurring themes too. Haenen’s signature technique employs coloured slabs of porcelain, pigmented with subtle glimmers and a flare resembling watercolour painting and then moulded by hand and rolled into a thin sheet, which she then proceeds to cut and joins in a variety of patterns. This leads to a patchwork style of clay that constitutes lively, colourful, organic vessels with a dynamic inner choreography.
Garth Clark wrote an article about Haenen’s work in the catalogue ‘A decade of work’ on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Interior Dances’ in The Princessehof National Museum of Ceramics in Leeuwarden. Garth wrote “the inside is trying to become the outside”, and that specific sentence, according to the artist herself, captures her Turbulent Vessels work perfectly.
In her more recent pieces, Haenen has gone from vertical vessel forms to complex tabletop landscapes that might reference a Chinese mountain. These works, that hover above the line of art and craft, are composed by two or more separate pieces embellished in a painterly manner, highlighting the influence abstract painting and landscape motifs, like rippling water, have on her art.
Haenen has been collecting praise for decades, and there is no other way, but to speak enthusiastically of her future career. In 1987, she was awarded the Werbeurs Stichting Fonds voor Beeldende Kunsten-Vormgeving en Bouwkunst and, in 1990, the Werbeurs Ministerie van WVC. In 1991, she received the Inax Design Prize for Europe from Japan and held her first retrospective exhibition in The Princessehof National museum of Ceramics in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands.
Haenen continues to include her works in international exhibitions. Her pieces can be found all around the world’s most prestigious collections, including the permanent collections of several museums, such as the Museum of Contemporary Ceramic Art in Shigaraki, Japan; the Museum of Fine Art in Boston or the Carnegie Institute Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. Her works are beloved in her home country, The Netherlands as well, where her works are part of the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Boijmans Museum van Beuningen in Rotterdam, and the Frans Hals Museum in the picturesque Haarlem. ~H.
