Cécile van Hanja born in Corsica (1964) graduated from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie (Amsterdam) in 1993.
Currently she lives and works in Haarlem (The Netherlands)

About Cécile her work:

In urban environments we are inundated daily with information and hectic impressions.
Cécile van Hanja seeks a balance between this outer city life and her private world.
In her studio she creates the tranquility she needs to be in direct contact with herself.
Studio space is a recurring motif in her oeuvre, painting.
It is a starting point and workplace, all at once: the occasion, site and dimension of her investigations. When she is working on a project she goes out into urban spaces, photographs architecture, and then transforms those images into paintings, altering color, light, and atmosphere.
The large paintings of Cécile van Hanja shows architectural spaces where corridors, rooms, or staircases seem familiar, but cannot be placed in a specific site or certain time.
She leaves the spaces remarkably empty so that it seems all context has been erased.
The images are filled with emptiness.
She is fascinated by the airless and lifeless neutrality of so many contemporary man-made spaces like empty airports, lobbies, and hotel rooms.
Empty rooms, like those in office buildings, are biological homes for awhile and then we leave them.
These anonymous environments generate suspense- the feeling that behind every door , around every corner, a possible threat awaits.
Originally, she explored the habitat of these temporary homes, rendering the private world visible and accessible to outsiders.
Recently, she has moved from the inside world to the façades, emphasizing architecture as a sort of alienation between people in our modern society, a society in which people do not know their neighbors, in which the architecture creates a sort of loneliness, a poverty of contact between people. Her work thus asks people to consider the politics of buildings and the responsibility of architects in creating these economic spaces.




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