Juul Kraijer

Juul Kraijer studied at Willem de Kooning Academy. The recorded working language is Dutch. Places of work recorded in the authority are Rotterdam. Work by Juul Kraijer is recorded in the collections of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Finnish National Gallery, Stadsarchief Rotterdam, Museum of Modern Art and Museum De Lakenhal.

Kraijer was born in Assen. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam, graduating in 1994 with a series of large format charcoal drawings. Her principal mediums are drawing, photography and collage. She occasionally makes sculptures and video-works. In the drawings Kraijer's subject is always female, naked and depersonalized, an archetype or personage rather than a particular individual. The model is sometimes multiplied: facing herself, head to head, or appearing as Siamese twins or triplets. In most works the human body is combined with other creatures or natural phenomena: surrounded by schools of little fish or swarms of moths, fused with branches or parts of animals or displaying mountainscapes on the skin. Kraijer favors charcoal, and only rarely works in colour. The size of her drawings is determined by the image, which is always depicted more or less life-size. Since 2012 photography has been an important medium in Kraijers practice. Her photographs are also mostly black and white and thematically closely related to her drawings. She often works with the same model, who poses with objects or animals, most notably snakes. Kraijer's works share an emblemata-like concision, showing no more than what is strictly necessary. In each image, the figure looms out of an undefined background. Definition of time is absent as well. No hairstyles or dress belonging to any specific period are shown, no hint of a narrative is present. The postures and facial expressions are deliberately restrained and intensely concentrated. They seem to have been adopted for eternity. Faces and bodies are a vehicle for meaning rather than portrayals of individuals. The impassive visage, in a state of half-sleep, seems to exist at an interface between self-awareness and self-extinction. The images elude traditional iconography. Kraijer creates naturalistic images that are memorably strange. Her work has been awarded four Dutch art prizes and has been included in major international exhibitions such as ARS 06 at the Museum of Modern Art KIASMA in Helsinki (2006), the Third Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art (2009), the Kochi-Muziris Biennale, India (2018) and Metamorphoses, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (2026)

• Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, The Netherlands (1998) • Stedelijk Museum Het Domein, Sittard, The Netherlands (1998) • Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2001) • Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, The Hague, The Netherlands (2006) • Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan, Italy | Zuoz, Switzerland (2007, 2014, 2023) • The Wapping Project/Bankside, London (2014) • Kunsthalle Giessen, Gießen, Germany (2014) • Drents Museum and CBK Drenthe, Assen, The Netherlands (2015) • Chimaera, Huis Marseille, Museum for Photography, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2017) • Galerie Les Filles du Calvaire, Paris, Frankrijk (2019) • Zweiheit, Museum Sinclair-Haus, Bad Homburg vor der Höhe, Germany (2020) • S, De Ketelfactory, Schiedam, The Netherlands (2021) • Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, India (2010, 2016, 2023) • Recontemporary, Turin, Italy. EPHEMERA. (2024) • FotoForum, Innsbruck, Austria. In Wirklichkeit. (2025)

The following is established of the heading itself.

On origins, the institutional record states the following. Recorded at birth as Julie Zwaantje Kraijer. It is also recorded that juul Kraijer was born in 1970 at Assen.