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+++Caren van Herwaarden+++

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| A publication that is close to the skin and won’t let you go.

| A collection of works on paper and watercolours, drawing, collages and sculptures.

| With text contributions by Merel Bem (author, lecturer, art historian, and copywriter), Guston Asselbergs (philosopher, author, musician), and Ludo van Halem (art historian and curator).

‘I have this lifelong fascination for the human body as a reservoir for our thoughts, doubts and fears.’ – Caren van Herwaarden

Dutch artist Caren van Herwaarden uses a multimedia approach in her practice including works on paper and watercolours, drawings, collages, and sculptures. She is in search of finding the meaning of compassion, humanity, physicality, and erotica through her work. This results in art pieces that show strength in vulnerability, softness in mercilessness, and comfort in defeat. She focusses on bare beings, without any façade or frills. Because when in conflict, where you are not in control and the world is no longer feasible you must rely on others.

The artist’s work became darker, tangible, rawer, and more layered in the past years. To intensify the intimacy and the possibility to empathize she aims to create her work to be as physical and tangible as possible, to the point you can almost touch and smell it. This is exactly what TOUCH carries out, a publication that is close to the skin and won’t let you go.

This monograph is layered, sweltering, beastly, earthly, and raw, alternated by transparency, lightness, and simplicity of pencil drawings. The artworks interchange from light to ominous, dark, and monumental. From fast and hectic to forcibly slow-adagio.

‘It intrigues me that our body knows so much, also about the other. The memory and ‘intelligence’ do not only live in our brain. It is precisely the body, the skin, and the muscles that store memories. Experiences are embedded in the body: the body memory. Our body can only tell our brain as much as our brain does to our body.’ – Caren van Herwaarden

Caren van Herwaarden studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam and AKI Academy of Art & Design. After graduating she worked at Leiden University in the anatomical collection to study the inside, the material from which we are built.