Nan Mulder

     
Nan Mulder
Leiden, Netherlands
info@nanmulder.com
www.nanmulder.com


Biography

Nan Mulder SSA, was born in Leiden, the Netherlands. She studied painting and printmaking at the Art Colleges of Amsterdam (1967-72) and Kraków, Poland (1972-73). She taught printmaking at Edinburgh College of Art and Dun Laoghaire School of Art and Design in Dublin. She specialises in mezzotint. Her work has been exhibited in solo and group exhibitions all over the world. She won a Scottish Arts Council Award (1980), the Intaglio Printmakers Prize (2007) and was shortlisted for a major prize at the First International Mezzotint Festival in Ekaterinburg, Russia.

Illustrated Talk

Double Vision
Since 1991 Dutch printmakers Nan Mulder and Gea Karhof have been travelling together. Armed with our drawing books, cameras and the Lonely Planet guide, they travelled to Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, India, Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal and Bhutan.

During their first trip to Nepal in 2004 they came in contact with two Nepalese printmakers. The country was going through a difficult phase. The Maoist regularly instigated strikes, forbidding even cars and buses on the roads. When they had to spend much longer in Kathmandu than planned, they decided to explore the contemporary art world, and through the Siddhartha Gallery in Kathmandu got to know the printmakers Ragini Upadhyay and Seema Sharma Shah. In their studios they saw the familiar etching presses, smelled ink and turpentine and found that they were not only linked through technique, but also through a similar vision in their work. This is how Double Vision was born: originally a travelling exhibition of two Dutch and two Nepalese printmakers looking at Asia from different points of views. The exhibition was to follow the route  Nan Mulder and Gea Karhof had travelled: starting in Edinburgh, where Nan lives (2007), then travelling to Haarlem, Netherlands (2008), and ending in the Siddhartha Gallery in Kathmandu (2008). Since then the exhibition has also been shown in Antwerp (Belgium), Eefde (the Netherlands) and in January 2013 in Islamabad (Pakistan). What originally started as an exhibition has now become a group. In 2013 the Pakistani printmakers Atif Khan and Zaira Ahmad Zaka joined the original four artists. This is a continuing project.  Nan Mulder and Gea Karhof will talk about the project and the impact of these exchanges and friendships on the life and work of the artists involved.

Exhibition

Double Vision
The exhibition Double Vision shown at IMPACT is a selection of the original exhibition of prints by Ragini Upadhyay, Seema Sharma Shah from Nepal, Gea Karhof from the Netherlands, Nan Mulder from Scotland and Atif Khan and Zaira Ahmad Zaka from Pakistan. The work shows how Asia and Europe have influenced the artists and how these cross-cultural exchanges have impacted on their prints. Nan Mulder and Gea Karhof met in 1968 while studying printmaking at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam and have been travelling together since 1991.  This exhibition supplements their illustrated about the origin of the Double Vision exhibition and group and its continuing evolution and showings in Europe and Asia.