Helena Jirina Maazel was born and raised in Prague in the former Czechoslovakia. She was educated at the Czech Technical University in Prague, where she studied architecture for a few years. She started working as window dresser and designer, and developed herself at night as a painter and graphic artist. After the Prague Spring she decided to flee. In the Netherlands she continued her studies at Ateliers ’63, where she met her partner for live Axel van der Kraan. Afterwards they continued to work together as the artist duo Axel en Helena van der Kraan. They lived and worked in Rotterdam since 1987. In 1989, they were awarded the Hendrik Chabot Award. In 1990, at the Museum Boymans Van Beuningen, there was a retrospective of their work with sculptures, drawings, and photography. Helena van der Kraan-Maazel died 14 June 2020 in Rotterdam from cancer. She was described as an artist, who "observed with a concerned look, who recorded her surroundings in noiseless portraits."
Work
Axel en Helena van der Kraan
The Dutch artist Axel van der Kraan had started as sculptor, and together they continued to make sculptures and installation art. Helena took it upon her to document these art projects in projects in photographs. This evolved into her own photographic art projects involving still life and portraits of people.
Series
Helena van der Kraan created a number of remarkable series of portraits. In 1986 with the series Medewerkers she took the picture of eighty employees of the Haags Gemeentemuseum, nowadays Kunstmuseum Den Haag. In 1995 she pictured the 75 members of the Dutch Senate, the upper house of the States General, the legislature of the Netherlands. In those days the ties where prominent attributes. The Members of the Senate, all with ties in the pictures, often looked a "little nervous."
''The Artdealers''
Another of her more famous work was the picture called The Art dealers as Toef Jaeger describes it:
The ''Bear and Teddy'' project
In her youth Helena van der Kraan had a special relation her teddy bear, which at young age she had named Bebbeba. She left him behind when she fled, but was reunited later on. Later on in life she started photographing teddy bears similar to the way she had portrayed people. Over the years she photographed over two hundred teddy bears, who sometimes "appear proud and self-assured, sometimes fearful and melancholy, but they are always dignified." The teddy bears were often portrayed naked, sometimes wearing a worn jacket.
