ABOUT
Artist Statement
Press Kit
CV
Alexandra Engelfriet is an award-winning artist and performer with boundless talent and skill. Her projects, solo exhibitions, and performances are featured internationally in museums, galleries, and private collections. Her earth art and earthworks explore the essence and physical of being in our place in the world. Engelfriet is also a skilled lecturer, workshop, and masterclass teacher. Her performances and sculptures have inspired authors and filmmakers. She is even more than a sculptor and performance artist. Engelfriet inspires other artists like a symbiotic, powerful, and ethereal muse. The physical and intangible beauty of her dance with earth and clay is primal, rough yet delicate and fluid. Both she and the audience are entranced. It is intimate, transmuting, transforming of space and earth. Engelfriet seems to be channeling her art through her movement and a metaphor of existence emerges with rhythmic touch and manipulation. Engelfriet’s performances are mesmerizing, freeing, and at times overwhelming, and immersive. Like a voyeur, we watch, beguiled, as she creates, with gentle forcefulness and intensity. She and we are consumed by the experience together.
“You discover the world inside of your body. It’s a big part of the research. I wasn’t even concerned with the end result.”
- Alexandra Engelfriet
Selected Awards
Recent Publications
Van Achterbergh Prize 2022, awarded by the Van Achterbergh-Domhof Foundation, 2022.
Grants from the Mondriaan Fund in 1993, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000, 2002, 2012, 2017, 2020, 2021 and 2022.
Harlan Boss Foundation artist-in-residency fellowship, 2019.
Grant from the Lighton International Artists Exchange Pro-gram, 2017.
Grant from the Tijlfonds – Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds, 2017.
Grant from the Stokroos Foundation, 2016.
Bronze Prize at the Gyeonggi International Ceramic Biennale 2015, South Korea.
Grant from the Wim de Haan Foundation, The Netherlands, 2015
Artist-in-Residence Award, Guldagergaard, InternationalCeramic Research Center – Denmark, 2008.
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2024: Kneading Dreams: Material Imagination and Agency in Performative Clay Works, Hanna Louise Grønneberg and Thea Møller Jensen, chapter 10 in Phenomenology, New Materialism, and Advances In the Pulsatile Imaginary: Rites Of Disimagination, published by Palgrave MacMillan Cham.
2024: The Kinetic Nature of Ceramics, Kristina Rutar, Ceramics Now Weekly #66.
2024: On the cover of Craft and Design Practice from an Embodied Perspective, edited by Nithikul Nimkulrat and Camilla Groth, published by Routledge.
2023: Hands, Eyes, Ceramics, Liesbet Waegemans, Lut Pil and Lotte Brown, published by BORGERHOFF & LAMBERIGTS.
2023: Publication by the Centre for Ceramic Art, Ringebu, Norway, with a text by art critic Jennifer Sormin.
2021: Opus 12/dépaysements, Local Contemporain, edition de Le Laboratoire.
2019: Delirious Lustwarande, Excursions in Contemporary Sculpture III, edited by Lustwarade, Platform for Contemporary Sculpture.
2018: LER!/CLAY!, published by Museum Jorn, Denmark, for the exhibition with the same name.
2018: On the cover of: Craft, edited by Tanya Harrod, published by Whitechapel Gallery, London, England.
2018: Traces et empreintes, by Joël Riff, Revue de la céramique et du verre, issue 220, Mai-June 2018.
2017: Vitamin C – Clay and Ceramic in Contemporary Art, published by Phaidon Press.
