Maja Klaassens
All my work revolves around these kinds of editing techniques. Editing can be both violent and creative, it has a huge impact on how we experience reality. Even minor adjustments in Grass – let’s say in the direction or brush size – can lead to very different outcomes. Doing the same thing over and over, it’s a repetition, but it’s always going to be different, every time.
Maja Klaassens (1990, New Zealand) is a multidisciplinary artist working across sculpture, painting, photography, video, and text. Her work focuses on how narrative structures from film and literature shape the way we perceive places and remember experiences. Central to her practice is an ongoing interest in editing: selecting, repeating, and arranging details to construct meaning. In her “grass” paintings, individual blades are painted with single brushstrokes, forming dense surfaces that read almost like text. Subtle variations in tone and composition suggest traces of events, allowing each viewer to read a different scene into the image.
Alongside these paintings, Klaassens creates sculptural series such as folded textiles placed in wooden boxes and lifelike nightstands filled with objects. These works refer to domestic spaces and routines, yet the human presence is absent. Recurring motifs like rose thorns, dorsal fins, and water droplets appear as fragments that point to a larger whole. By combining these elements, Klaassens examines how fragments, details, and omissions contribute to the stories we construct about our surroundings.
