ANTON COTTELEER lives and works in Kalmhout, Belgium. He is honoured with a Laureate at the Higher Institute for Fine Arts and holds a Master in Sculpture from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Antwerp. He initiated his career at the Koninklijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp.
Cotteleer is recognised for the combination of modelled human and animal fragments with deconstructed domestic objects. He is interested in the relationship between humans and animals to the domestic biotope, which is seen as authentic and personal within the Western world, yet mostly interchangeable and
conducted. Ambiguities and dualities keep the work in a grey zone. Eroticism, innocence, mysticism and
banality each claims their presence but is always negated by the other. Visual and substantive contradictions set the tone. As a result, the works are rarely explicit and remain partially elusive. The works contain autobiographical traces in addition to memories from collective memory. Memories, whether fed by personal photographic material or not, are used. However, this is not applied consistently, putting the artist and the viewer in an uncanny position. Questions around the authenticity of memory, truth and illusion intrude.
Anton Cotteleer has exhibited extensively and his works are included in numerous public, corporate and private collections.