About me, Sander Kletter
I'm not trying to tell a chronological story about myself here. The many detours I took and the simultaneous following of different trails and secondary paths during my career make it almost impossible to construct a linear story. The beginning is simple: I was born in the city of Haarlem, in the Netherlands, in 1962. I will answer four imaginary questions: What training did you receive in the field of art? What have you created as an artist? Have you done anything else in the art world? You also wrote about art, right?
What training did you receive in the field of art?
To begin with, I studied at the Academy of Visual Arts in Amsterdam from 1982 to 1986. During my training I also got involved with other forms of art. I played electric violin in a band. I took several courses in the theater area. I traveled as a street artist in the roles of clown, mime, juggler and acrobat through the main squares in Europe, such as Florence, Paris and Vienna. I directed some amateur theater performances. Immediately after my training I met my wife Gaby in Florence. A few years later, I took the post-academic Image and Media Technology course at Utrecht University of the Arts for two years. Another five years later I had the honor of participating in the masterclass “On creating a masterpiece” in Amsterdam, led by the world-famous Czech painter Milan Kunc. In 2010, at the age of forty-six, I finally started studying art history, more early in my life at the age of eighteen I really wanted to do that, at the University of Groningen. In 2013 I graduated cum laude as an art historian with a specialization in modern art.
Above: Sander Kletter with his wife Gaby during the opening of the Besoin d'Amour exhibition in 1995 at the Outline gallery in Amsterdam. Below: Sander working in his studio in Scheemda in 1996.
What have you created as an artist?
To begin with, I created a lot as an artist, I experimented with many different techniques and styles. After the academy, for years I painted abstractly, inspired by the great American artist Jackson Pollock. I then made dioramas, collages and montages, including some extremely complicated but humorous technical objects. A prime example of this is A.T. Scheuermann from 1990 (see image).
However, I mainly did a lot of landscapes, model drawings and portraits. Another important theme in my is represented in my Besoin d'Amour series. This series, which has a love theme, has received regular attention from the Dutch media over the years. In 1999, the now well-known Dutch program creator, writer, journalist and presenter Janine Abbring published a complimentary full-page color article about me and that series in the Groninger Dagblad. Previously, large newspapers such as Nieuwsblad van het Noorden and Brabants Nieuwsblad also paid attention to this.
My free work has been regularly exhibited individually and in groups in galleries and during all kinds of art events in Dutch cities such as Amsterdam, Bergen op Zoom, Den Bosch, The Hague, Drachten, Haarlem, Hardenberg, Huizen, Veendam and Winschoten. Abroad it was shown in Ferrara (IT) and Paris (FR). In addition to my free work, I have done a large number of portraits and other commissioned works of art.
Sander Kletter, A.T. Scheuermann, 1990, object on wheels with moving parts including Boston Brace, helmet, dentures, arch supports, collage, light and glass, height 180 cm, photo: © Geek Zwetsloot, Amsterdam, 1990
Have you done anything else in the art world?
I have always been very entrepreneurial. In 1996 I founded Galerie Beeldkracht together with my wife. This gallery of contemporary abstract and figurative art would eventually become one of the best-known galleries in the Netherlands. It was an extremely successful art company, which represented renowned artists from all over the world, not only in the gallery itself, but also at dozens of Dutch and international art fairs for many years. In my role as a gallerist, I sold thousands of works of art, mediated between clients and artists, valued works of art, framed works of art in my own framing shop and rented works of art to individuals and companies. The gallery closed at the beginning of 2022, after which I emigrated to Portugal with my wife, with the aim of starting a calmer (!) period of my life.
In addition to my own art and the gallery, I have also been very concerned about passing on my knowledge about art to other people. I taught classes for (amateur) artists between 1989 and 2003. My courses were always full. I have been associated with numerous educational institutions over a short or long period of time, both in the Netherlands and abroad, not only as a teacher but also as a director and organizer. From 1996 to 2003 I founded my own private training course, with the aim of bridging the gap between amateur art and professional art. The two-year course attracted participants from all over the Netherlands for seven years. I wrote an extensive companion book to my private training.
As an art historian, I have given dozens of PowerPoint lectures over the past ten years about style periods, movements and the great artists in art history. I sometimes did this at the invitation of companies and institutions. But I also gave lecture series in my own gallery, as one of the many activities of Galerie Beeldkracht.
During the opening of our Dutch gallery's anniversary exhibition, the company's large two-story building with a total of seven exhibition spaces was fully packed. Hundreds of people attended the event. There was even a crowd on the sidewalk in front of the gallery!
The invitation to the gallery's 15th anniversary (2011).
You also wrote about art, right?
As a gallerist, I wrote substantive and promotional texts about art for more than twenty-five years: texts for invitation cards and other printed matter, a few hundred press releases, magazine articles in Kijk op het Noorden and Lourens J.C., among others, dozens of texts for books and catalogues. I wrote texts for several parts of the Dreamscapes series, among other things.
My book Turbulence Surrounding Video Art: Art Critical Reflections on a New Medium 1970-2010 was part of an eleven-part academic series on the history of Dutch art criticism. A peculiarity is that I, together with another author involved, did not receive a PhD from the university. In other words, I was just a “master” and not a “PhD”. Normally such work could only be entrusted to a PhD art historian. However, the confidence of both editors of the series was so great in my abilities based on my experience in the art world and study results that they nevertheless asked me to write the book...
Over the years, I have provided the various websites, which I built and designed myself, with several hundred website texts with biographies of artists my wife and I represent in our gallery. In passing, I was also responsible for Search Engine Optimization, an area that deals with the how and why of websites being found on the internet. This internet aspect of my career can be seen as a logical consequence of the aforementioned post-academic course in Image and Media Technology.
Starting in 2012, during the final phase of my art history studies, more than 1,000 art history and art philosophy texts were added to the number of texts I had already written as a gallerist. I wrote them for the website artsalonholland.nl, which I designed and managed. This was an ever-expanding Dutch-language online museum guide and art encyclopedia that existed until December 2022. The site was sponsored by two important Dutch museums, the Groninger Museum and the Centraal Museum in Utrecht. Art Salon Holland was extremely popular with the art-loving public and in (artistic) education. At the time of its closure, the site attracted approximately 60,000 unique visitors per month and had nearly two million page views annually!
After graduating with honors from Groningen State University at the age of fifty, the senior lecturer in the department of modern art asked me to write a book on the history of Dutch art criticism of video art. The book was published in 2016. As an art historian, I have also published magazine articles in the Groninger Museum Magazine and the Bulletin Vereniging Rembrandt.
Confident that I have managed to give an impression of myself as an artist, art historian and author with the biography on this page, I happily greet all visitors to this site!
Sander Kletter, Outubro 2023