Biography

Sandra Touw is a professional visual artist. She was educated at the Rotterdam Academy of Arts (Willem de Kooning Academy) in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. After working as a professional artist for a few years she continued in her career as an art teacher and concept developer and manager of art projects at the interface of art and technology. Since a few years Sandra has returned to painting. Now she combines both activities, with an increasing emphasis on her practice as an artist.

Sandra lives and works in Rotterdam.

Artist statement

My work includes oil paintings, drawings and I am experimenting with film. My work relates to identity; who are you, where are you from, where are you going? My paintings depict how people manifest themselves, or what place people occupy in time. I take inspiration from old family photos and photos that I find abroad. The children in the pictures especially fascinate me, because there is still a promise in them. In my work I use the discrepancy between that youthful promise and (thus) future that now has been converted into a past life. A life of greatness, habit, guilt, bad luck, happiness and everything else. Pictures of a boy from Rotterdam who died in a labour camp in Germany at the age of 17 look as endearing as a picture of an unknown Slovak girl whose life course I do not know. That uniqueness of a person versus the greatness of life, in which we are (in a larger perspective) sand grains on the beach that seem insignificant, or are crushed by much larger events, that’s what my paintings are about.