Marcelle Hanselaar: Curated By Kamini Vellodi

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“A febrile, uncensored imagination” is how the renowned art critic Laura Gascoigne described the working mind of Marcelle Hanselaar in The Spectator a year ago in a feature that puzzled over why this remarkable Dutch artist whose work is collected by the world’s top museums, is not better known publicly. ‘Transfigured Archteypes’ is an opportunity to put this right. The exhibition shows an extraordinary series of Hanselaar’s recent paintings in the grand setting of The In & Out, St. James’s Square.  It presented by Aleph Contemporary and curated by the academic and author Kamini Vellodi who has written an essay to accompany the exhibition. Here is an extract: 

We also live in our dreams, we do not live only by day. Jung, The Red Book 

"In the darkly wondrous worlds of Marcelle Hanselaar, the drama of human existence, with its pathos and absurdity, its terrors and passions, is staged with an intensity and fringed with a mystery that propels it towards the sphere of the mythic. Primal qualities of the human condition - desire, mourning, fear, violence, solitude - are refracted through the dynamics between self and other, individual and socius, dreams and the waking state. Beyond definite time or place, these suspended image realms conjure states of being that transcend cultures and epochs. The archaic – with its elements of the cultic, the prophetic, and the ritualistic – meets the theatre of the contemporary psyche. And throughout this fertile universe of symbols and archetypes, we are made aware of a pervasive and insistent exploration of the liminal states of the human subject, the thresholds at which man becomes other, the ever-shifting borderlines of the self.”