About Natasja Alers

Natasja Alers combines diverse disciplines: ceramics, installations, oil paintings and collages. She grew up in The Hague and graduated in 2012 from the Ceramics Department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam. She then studied fine arts at the Weissensee KunstHochschule in Berlin. She works as an autonomous artist, DJ, art and co-director of the Grauzone festival. Tension, vulnerability, and paradoxical feelings are central to her oeuvre.

She focuses on the inner world of the human body. Alers plays with the viewer’s expectations. Her work visually attracts you, pulls you closer, but at the same time gets under your skin. Her method of pushing and stretching the sculpted body from the inside increases tension and fragility in the material. The glazes and the specific colour combination refer to the redefinition of the skin of the sculpture.

Natasja has also made the Alers series: all pieces are unique prototypes. For example, the nipple vase was made in an edition of 50, the printed nipples form a functional vase. The object invites to be touched, but at the same time engages with the taboo of the female body part. All vases are handmade, and the three colours of glaze run through each other during firing, which makes each vase different.

Alers works with slabs of clay, which she shapes and then subsequently combines with the elements printed in moulds. They are, as it were, collages in clay. The transitions between the shapes are fluid and body parts are often no longer recognizable.

This was clearly visible during ARTZUID 2021, where two of her sculptures were on display: A Fluid Touch (2020) and Breast Party XL (2021); she made the latter work, especially for ARTZUID.