Art, for Bianca Severijns, reflects her versatile, multicultural world and explores subjective narratives within the context of being uprooted and displaced. Her recent artworks stem from times of war and crisis and render new realities characterized by destruction, loss, and chaos on the one hand, with the hope of acclimation, unification, and revival on the other. Engaging paper as her medium, she finds that her self-developed technique of paper-tearing is a highly meditative process. It results in hundreds of small paper pieces with rough, rugged edges - representing life's imperfection.
Severijns (b.1964) was born in the Netherlands to a multicultural family. After living in various places for almost twenty years, she plans to relocate back to Europe. While her uprooting was always by choice, her experiences as a new immigrant building a home in a new country became the inspirational foundation from which her art practice sprouted. In her earlier pieces, Severijns sought to analyze the theme of displacement and how the phases of nature intertwine with human conditions, such as forced uprooting, nesting, and revival. In a quest for a more profound exploration of the displacement theme, she began examining the basic needs of uprooted people. She created artworks concentrating on a re-conceptualization of humanitarian first aid, as evident in her signature series, Protective Blankets, which conveys fundamental human rights and needs: security, protection, acceptance, respect, and freedom.
Severijns' contemporary art is known for her original and distinguished paper practice, in which she aesthetically arranges hundreds of hand-torn pieces of paper into sculptural tapestries, murals, reliefs, and three-dimensional objects. Inspired by minimalistic art and natural cycles, she creates highly detailed abstracts. Her works were exhibited at the 2019 Venice Biennial; Gustav-Lübcke Museum in Hamm, Germany; the 2020 and the 2023 Craft & Design Biennial; Museum of the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel; the 2021 and 2023 Shanghai Paper Biennial; the 2022 International Paper Biennial in Haacht, Belgium; and Periscope Gallery, Tel Aviv, where her first solo exhibition was held in 2019.
Severijns' works are in private collections worldwide, including the Gustav-Lübcke Museum collection. She is a member of the IAPMA (The International Association of Papermakers and Paper Artists).
