1946 - 2016

Born in IJmuiden (NL), died in NL.

Hans Clavin (pseudonym of Hans H.H.A. van der Heijden) was born in 1946 in the Dutch harbour town of IJmuiden. Clavin, one of the pioneers of visual poetry in the Netherlands, made his debut in 1966 in the magazine Vers Univers, and was closely involved with international concrete and visual poetry until the mid-1970s. He launched the magazine Subvers, which ran for six years, in 1970. Clavin developed his concrete and visual poetry at many different levels and collected the results in a variety of artists’ books. He has always had a clear sense that the formal realization of visual poetry is not a question of style, but more one of attitude. Everything, from letter to objet trouvé, from collage and décollage to signal and gesture, can serve as raw material for ‘total poetry’. Clavin consistently adopts visuality as the basic principle for the realization of his poems; his visual language is strongly informed by the world of comic strips and film, newspapers and advertising. The collage technique came to dominate his poetry from the 1970s, although he continued to base himself on the letter, word, and association. Images and fragments of text are deconstructed and manipulated, yet an element of familiarity remains, enabling these images, quotations and letter fragments to function in an entirely different context: one that can be critical, grotesque or humorous.