You could call her one of the greatest painters in the Netherlands. Since 2017, 28-year-old mural artist Judith de Leeuw has painted facades of apartment buildings all over the world, from New York to Tbilisi and Kuala Lumpur, often twenty or twenty-five meters high. It is located in the middle of Amsterdam, as an extension of Leidseplein Diversity in Bureaucracy (2021), perhaps her best-known work. Four stories high, above a snack bar, two black ballerinas whirl between flying documents.
Many of her murals are about unequal opportunities, says De Leeuw during a conversation in a grand café in Amsterdam – she is wearing her yellow hat. “I want to stand up for people who are not being heard, for people who are having a hard time.” She speaks energetically and passionately, but she is tired, she says. “I often have trouble sleeping because I can't stop thinking.”
AvroTros will broadcast the documentary on Wednesday evening JDL Behind The Wall from Deborah Faraone Mennella made about her. The director followed De Leeuw when she painted a mural on a residential apartment in the southern Italian city of Taranto. A woman appears to be dancing in a white robe while unknown hands hold her. Love is stronger than death vol. 4 is an “ode to her father”, who died in 2022.
Like all her paintings, the work is realistic. Gray tones dominate, the light is almost Caravaggist. Her work often refers to social issues, such as unequal opportunities for LGBT people and other minority groups.
Faraone Mennella portrays De Leeuw as a perfectionist, hard worker – an assistant who does not apply a gray underlay to the facade evenly enough has to give up his paint sprayer – but also as a woman who carries with her painful experiences from her youth.
De Leeuw, daughter of an expert in IT security and a professor of history, led a rough street life as a teenager in the Amsterdam graffiti scene. She wandered, used a lot of drugs and ended up in a closed youth institution. “I was not allowed to talk to friends or family for the first few months,” she says in the documentary.
You often talk about this in interviews. Is that part of your life story still important to you?
“The first time I talked about my youth, I did so to point out abuses in youth care. I do not regret it. But I also find it frustrating that it keeps getting highlighted, even now. If I had had a choice, it would have been a different documentary.
“Although I understand Deborah's choice. It shows how I have been formed as an artist. I come from a dark corner of society myself. I hate it when brands or people profile themselves with social themes without meaning it. I can empathize with people who experience dark things. I see beauty in that: in myself and in them.”
You paint those people in detail. They are always beautiful, their clothes fall in graceful, baroque folds…
“Your question is: why aren't those people ugly? I've thought about that too. I once had the idea to make an entire series with people who do not fit the usual beauty picture. But no one wants that on their wall.
“Last year, with money from the Amsterdam Art Fund, I made a plan for an LGBT mural with two men kissing. I have found six walls in Amsterdam where I can paint, but I can't get rid of it. Residents of a student dormitory said not everyone in the building would feel represented. In Amsterdam-West a housing association said: 'I wouldn't do that here, because then you would have a big problem.' There is still a small chance that it will work out, but I think this will be my first project to fail. To be honest, that's why I want to stop what I'm doing.”
You want to quit street art?
“No, I just want to stop painting murals [ze wil wel kunst in de openbare ruimte blijven maken, red.]. I feel like people look at wall art differently now than they did eight years ago when I started. Art that conveys a message is becoming less and less popular. It is more about beauty. Bright pink, purple, flowers, beautiful women, children laughing in front of a mirror… That has never driven me to create murals. So I want to stop this year, yes. And besides, it's only a matter of time before we're replaced by robots. So then I can get there early.”
You mean AI can start generating work like yours?
“It already does that. Midjourney, the world's largest visual AI platform, has used my work as input. If you enter my name there, a robot will come up with works of art in my style and with my themes. Black and white, hard light, dramatic poses with white cloths, a social theme. And it has to be on a gigantic wall of at least twenty meters. The AI understands all that.”
What do you think of that?
“I feel quite honored. If I were to drop dead tomorrow, someone would still do my work, even if it was no longer done under my name. That's quite beautiful, isn't it?
And because AI will now do my work, I can start making other things. I want to start making sculptures. Or project a message on the Royal Palace on Dam Square. Or I could build a rubber duck six meters high from dead fake chicks and then put it in front of KFC with a sound system that Splash pieter pater by Alfred Jodocus Kwak plays. I'll just give you an example.”
JDL Behind The Wall, by Deborah Faraone Mennella and Interakt production house, AvroTros. Broadcast 17/1 on NPO 2, 8:30 PM
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