Claudette Schreuders: Genesis, Jack Shainman Gallery, New York
Thu 5 Jun 2025 to Fri 1 Aug 2025
513 West 20th Street, NY 10011
Tue-Sat 10am-6pm
Jack Shainman Gallery presents Genesis, an exhibition of new work by Claudette Schreuders, the artist’s eighth solo exhibition with the gallery. Bringing together figurative sculptures made in both wood and bronze, Genesis reimagines scenes and characters from the suburban landscape of Cape Town that Schreuders calls home. Using the raw material of her own life as the foundation to create portraits that are equally archetypal and idiosyncratic, Schreuders explores how specific forms can convey universal truths and how personal history remains fundamentally connected to social reality.
For over thirty years, Schreuders has made sculptures about the human figure that express a deep understanding of human psychology. Working slowly and gradually, Schreuders carefully shapes her material to create uncannily familiar subjects that invite association and comparison while at the same time resisting any single link or reference. Though the poses and arrangements of her figures are often static, straightforward and direct, Schreuders pays great attention to the subtleties of each face, where slight inflections of shape and contour, or line and color, can provide viewers with the necessary detail to see humanity in figures that might otherwise appear impersonal. Looking at the historical examples of West African and Medieval sculpture, American folk and outsider art as well, Schreuders borrows the simplicity of form and composition found in those traditions as a way of sparking interpretation and emotional investment.
The works in Genesis were made after the conclusion of Schreuders’ previous exhibition with the gallery, Doubles, in 2022. In that exhibition, Schreuders investigated the universal experience of isolation that resulted from the lockdown during COVID-19 pandemic. Her sculptural figures were rendered in joined pairs in which each seemed to hauntingly, if not exactly, mirror the other. In Genesis Schreuders returned to the confines of her own home or studio and looked at the larger world of the suburbs as a kind of idyll in itself, one that can provide the time and space to contemplate the essential structures and forms of life around us.
Like its biblical reference, the exhibition title reflects Schreuders’ sustained emphasis on creating simplistic yet original forms as a way of pursuing profound truths. In the titular sculpture in the exhibition, her partner is shown supine while reading Robert Crumb’s The Book of Genesis. The muted and relatively restrained palette that Schreuders uses to describe the scene ultimately belies its subtlety of detail and psychological implication. This dynamic is present throughout the exhibition in works that are disarmingly approachable before revealing themselves to be materially complex and narratively open-ended. In School (2024), made in bronze, Schreuders depicts her son sitting pensively in a chair too small for his body. Though it appears to depict an exaggerated yet familiar scene, the richly detailed texture and surface of the figure suggest depths of meaning. Like Genesis (2024), Work (2024) considers the act of creation itself, as Schreuders herself is shown fixed in a moment of contemplation while she holds a newly made sculpture in her hands.
The relationship between personal experience and collective history is explored in Crucible (2025), a work originally commissioned by the University of Stellenbosch, Schreuders’ alma mater. A park bench cast in bronze is home to a whole host of indigenous birds that create a delicate balance and equilibrium between them. Schreuders uses the park bench as a formal and conceptual foundation for the work because its history remains charged by the legacy of apartheid, which saw it function as a symbol of exclusion. Schreuders allows the bench to be a site of transformation and possible harmony—it can produce something new out of an original period of trial and tribulation.
Throughout Genesis, Schreuders’ sculptures return to the commonplace and the quotidian, as they ask for a heightened attention to the world of experience that might otherwise be overlooked. With these familiar characters, scenes and moments as her subject matter, she pursues what is universal in them and relevant to all.
About Claudette Schreuders
Claudette Schreuders (b. 1973 in Pretoria, South Africa) lives and works in Cape Town, where she graduated with a Master’s degree from the Michaelis School of Fine Art in 1998. She was part of the Liberated Voices exhibition at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1999. From 2004-2005 her first solo museum exhibition toured the United States and in 2011 she had a solo exhibition at the LUX Art Institute in California. Schreuders has shown extensively in group exhibitions, including Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now, at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011), Since 2000: Printmaking Now, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (2006) and Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary South African Art at the Museum for African Art and the Cathedral of St John the Divine, New York (2004). Schreuders’ work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa and the Pretoria Art Museum, South Africa, among others.
