About

Petra de Vree is born in 1960 in Batenburg, a small picturesque town in the Netherlands. In 1982, during her art studies, she traveled to Africa for six months. She took the opportunity to explore the land of the Egyptian Pharaohs and the Kenyan Masai, as well as traveling down the White Nile in Sudan and to the interior of Uganda. This   journey had a powerful impact on her life and on her art, as it marked a definitive turning point.

More than ten years later, in 1993, Petra moved with her husband to Nepal. In Kathmandu she designed innovative wooden toys  and learned to manually create her own paper. In the fifteen years that followed, she worked in Bolivia, Ghana and Guatemala. Here she created her own furniture line from metal in combination with wood and handmade paper, adapting the style to the culture  and available materials of each country. 

Petra rediscovered her love for clay during her stay in the highlands of Bolivia in 2006.  Touching the material it felt like coming home. In a short time she developed the characteristic and recognizable style that her work shows today. Many years on four different continents have influenced her development as an artist.

In 2008 she returned to the Netherlands and during the six years that followed she became known to art lovers in her home country. Her sculptures were purchased by many private art collectors, as well as by public places such as the municipality of Wageningen, the Dutch Cardiology Association and the Network of Female Alumni of Wageningen University.

Petra continued her career in Dhaka in 2014 and lived in Bangladesh for three years. Poverty was visible everywhere and Petra experienced an underestimation of female talents. Terrorist threats mainly kept Petra in her studio during those years, yet she felt the deep need to look for the positive side of life. The stunning colors of the saris and the fertility of the soil thus became her main sources of inspiration. Exotic seed pods and other creations of nature were too beautiful to ignore; this can still be seen today in her sculptural works.

In 2017, Petra moved to Hanoi, her last residence abroad. There she worked on two projects. Treasures of Earth expresses the relationship between man and nature. It is based on the landscape of Ha Long Bay in northern Vietnam.

The second project was titled Focus on the Lotus. The beauty of Vietnam’s national plant deeply inspired Petra and her aim was to show other facets of the plant than just the flower. The sculptures from this series can be admired elsewhere on the site.

Since September 2022, the artist has her residence in The Hague, the Netherlands. She works in two studios, one in The Hague and one in Wageningen.

Her sculptures are purchased by people all over the world, from Canada to Australia, and from France to Japan and Vietnam.

Artist Statement

Living abroad for many years on four different continents is a great privilege for a European artist. I have seen many colors, customs and forms that we do not see in our own country. The unique blend of different cultural impressions smoothly became one of the main sources of inspiration for my work.

Being a woman is my main source of inspiration, so I express myself through female sculptures. I like to portray the female figure powerful, proud and self-assured. Yet they are vulnerable.

For me, people are closely connected to nature. I admire the endless variety of shapes and colors that arise naturally. The smooth undulating lines of a landscape, the shapes of fruits or the spiraling growth of a vine, the beautiful colors of fish and birds, the unique phenomena of the sea world and the rough texture of a plowed land.
I often collect things from nature such as seed pods, coral stone, rocks or plant parts. Once in my hands they become my treasures.

On the other hand, I am concerned about the disconnection between humans and nature. In Ha Long Bay in North Vietnam, I saw the plastic floating on the water, hanging on the rocks and washing up on the beaches. We produce waste and don’t really care about what happens to it after it’s collected from our homes and out of our sight. In some of my sculptures I express our precious connection to the earth. I want to honor the beautiful resilient creatures of nature, I rearrange them, enlarge or distort them and use this in the sculptures. Because nature is even more fragile than we.

To me, taking care of the precious planet earth is the same as taking care of ourselves.