Marcelle Hanselaar
Biography
(Dutch, b. 1945)
Born in Rotterdam, Holland, Marcelle Hanselaar is one of the most accomplished printmakers working in Britain today. After training at the Royal Academy in the Hague from 1962-64, and at the Rijks Academy in Amsterdam from 1977-78, she went on to hold teaching posts in China and London. Entirely self-taught as a painter in oils, she took to etching after attending a printmaking course at Kensington and Chelsea College in 2001.
Etching is the art form in which Marcelle Hanselaar has demonstrated an uncommon facility. Like other great practitioners of the medium before her - Goya, Max Beckmann, Max Klinger and indeed her own contemporary Paula Rego - Hanselaar brilliantly exploits the contrast of light and shade that the etching technique makes possible, in order to explore the bleaker, more unsettling facets of the human psyche.
Although often leavened with a certain mordant humour, much of Marcelle Hanselaar’s work comes across as an uncompromising exploration of human relationships. Her figures - some wearing masks or animal outfits to suggest ambivalent sexual identity - are like actors in a dark Freudian drama set in claustrophobically confined interiors bathed in shadow. This is a Gothic universe of carnal desire and psychosexual trauma inhabited by nightmarish creatures borrowed from myth and legend.
In 2005, the British Museum acquired an entire suite of Marcelle Hanselaar’s etchings for its permanent collection - an acknowledgment of the artist’s idiosyncratic vision and the extraordinarily accomplished technique through which she articulates it. 2007 saw the British Museum displaying Hanselaar’s entire etchings collection of ‘La Petit Mort’ in the Museums Print room, as part of the ‘New Aquisitions’ show.