Jasper Krabbé

Jasper Krabbé is a well-reputed Dutch painter, visual artist and photographer. His artworks often combine photography with multiple materials, from used envelopes and layers of paint to pages that have been torn out of a book.
Summer is Full of Hope hosts a collection of painted photographs, straight from Jasper’s personal archive. The pieces are heavily inspired by dreams, memories, the notion of transience and poetry. The incomplete, illogical way in which memories appear to us clearly rings through in the images he created.

Krabbé started as a street artist as part of the first collective in Amsterdam, United Street Artists. At the moment he has a column in Harper’s Bazaar, hosts television show ArtMen and often makes appearances in shows likeDe Wereld Draait Door. Art runs through his veins: his great-grandfather, grandfather and dad (famous actor and director Jeroen Krabbé) all were prolific painters, making Jasper the fourth painter in line.

Summer is Full of Hope opens on June 13th – this Saturday – at Graanmarkt 13, Antwerp and will be on show until Thursday 2nd of July.

1. How would you describe what you do?
I’d like to make paintings that look like they were found in a forgotten coach house, hidden between Moroccan tents, hatboxes, cabin trunks and vintage gowns that once were worn dancing the foxtrot, now half eaten away by moths.

2. At what time do you start your day and what’s the thing you do first?
I start at 6.00 and the first thing I do is write down my dreams. If I can’t remember it, I make one up.

3. What is the reason you started doing what you do? What makes you so passionate about it?
I started painting because it was pretty inevitable: there are four generations of artists or painters in my family. I am passionate about art. It is my salvation, my lifebuoy, my love.

4. What or who is your source of inspiration?
It’s a beautiful yet slightly haughty lady with small hairs in the nape of her neck, only to be seen in indirect sunlight, too subtle to draw. A lady who, despite repeated attempts, never writes back … Desirable but impossible in every respect.

5. Which is your all-time favourite design?
The butterfly chair. Not because it’s comfortable to sit in, but because it’s the most sensual, funky chair in the world.

6. Do you see yourself walking down this road forever, or do you have other creative calls? 
I might look into acting perhaps. And I’m writing too.

7. Which piece of work would you consider your very own masterpiece?
Collected Drawings nr. 02.

8. If you had a time machine, in what year would you be living?
Probably in 1902 in Vienna, that seems an interesting age.

9. Cookies and milk, or chips and soda?
Neither.

10. If you could give yourself one single piece of advice before you started this adventure, what would it be?
Forget about it.