Gracia Khouw
Delft (the Netherlands), 1967
The work of visual artist Gracia Khouw (1967) includes paintings murals and (digital) prints). Her works explore language, both visual and auditory and is inspired by visual data and signage in everyday life such as billboards, adverts and pictograms. She creates minimal arrangements in which our comprehension of letters and their symbolic meaning is disturbed. Similar to how a word can lose its meaning when repeated, Khouw’s images float between abstract designs and readable letters and symbols.
In her work Khouw succeeds in fortifying the power of text and signs and the disguise of their meaning at the same time. To her, the alphabet is a sign system of horizontals, verticals, diagonals and curves. In the elaboration these signs become clear, precise shapes, mostly devised in signal colours. She uses strict orderly principles for her compositions with letters, letter signs and signs, such as symmetry and grid, visual rhyme or fragmentations. Khouws work is a form of visual poetry, in which sound plays an important part.
Khouw has exhibited extensively internationally with notable exhibitions: Visual Arts Center of New Jersey (US), the RAW Art Fair in Rotterdam. She is included in private collections worldwide. She is a recipient of ISCP New York (US) and Frans Masereel Center Residency, Kasterlee, Belgium. Gracia Khouw attended the Academy the Arts Rotterdam (now Willem de Kooning Academy) and the Academy for Industrial Design Eindhoven.
