Marleen Sleeuwits NL, b. 1980

Multi-disciplinary artist, Marleen Sleeuwits has a keen eye for the disconcerting quality of seemingly mundane, everyday spaces. Central to her work is the examination of impersonal environments – places that could be at once everywhere and nowhere. Marleen’s artistic practice gradually evolved from photographing these spaces to intervening with them. She frequently reuses location-specific materials – such as panels from dropped ceilings, carpet tiles, fluorescent lighting tubes and glass wool – in her installations. She plays with perspectives, optical illusions and scale. In recent works, she has increasingly blurred the line between the 2D photo and spatial art, with the result of calling into question the visual aspect of reality.

‘In my work, I adjust the places I encounter. It started by making small changes in interiors, but they have become more and more extreme.’ She adds layers to spaces like office buildings or strips them in order to discover what surprises are hidden behind a wall or ceiling. In her current practice, Marleen Sleeuwits increasingly reuses the inherent characteristics of a location. By doing so, she questions notions of affordances, material, design, usability, and, most importantly, recognisability.

By scanning the artist’s work, looking for clues, you think you are getting a hold of the image – only to once again become completely lost in dizzying, repetitive inversions. Her art twists the visual element of reality, plays with scale, and creates optical illusions. Moreover, through her emergence from behind the camera into the field of practice, she alternatingly challenges the role of photographer, sculptor, architect, or painter.