I would like to describe myself as a “photographer without a camera”.
— Katrien De Blauwer
Whatever you do, don’t tell Katrien de Blauwer that she makes collages: “Let's say I’m a photographer without a camera. For me, cutting is comparable to clicking on the shutter release”. She snips, glues, assembles, infringes, colors and handles photographs from the old magazines she collects. Close to photomontage or film editing, her works conceal an intense narrative charge. They are linked to memory and personal history, but, paradoxically, as intimate as they are anonymous, they become the possible scenario of everyone. “What Katrien de Blauwer unearths in her black and white images is the archaeology of ambiguity. She doesn't cut this ambiguity of desire with a raging knife: on the contrary, it interests her. She works it to the maximum. She refines and sharpens it".
— Philippe Azoury
Katrien De Blauwer, born in 1969 in Ronse, Belgium, is a visual artist working with photography and photomontage from vintage images. She collects, cuts, and reassembles fragments from old magazines to create narrative compositions where memory, desire, and ambiguity intersect. Her practice, close to cinematic montage, explores the relationship between image and viewer through evocative visual stories.
In 2023, she presented When I Was a Boy / Commencer at the Villa Vauban – Musée d’art de la ville de Luxembourg as part of the European Month of Photography, bringing together two of her major series. In 2024, her work was shown in several major international events: We Are Happy Here In A Happy House at La Gaya Scienza (Nice), Don’t we touch each other just to prove we are still here? at the Princeton University Art Museum (USA), Art Brussels (Brussels Expo), Distilled From Scattered Blue at Galeri̇st (Istanbul), and the LESS Festival of Contemporary Collage (Skovgaard Museum, Denmark).
Her work is also recognized through international publications and curatorial projects, highlighting her ability to reinvent visual language through collage and memory.