After experimenting for years with very different techniques, Couzijn van Leeuwen discovered, purely by chance, cardboard. “We move in concert, my cardboard and myself, begetting beautiful offspring”. Couzijn van Leeuwen is “the type of genius artists who delights in just observing what his hands produce.” This is how Sacha Bronwasser described Alexander Calder in a review on his 2012 exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum The Hague. “The impassioned creator who rarely provides any other justification for his artwork than that he can’t refrain from making it”. Van Leeuwen’s studio reminds one of Isak Jakobi’s fairy-tale antiques shop of in Berman’s movie Fanny and Alexander.
In Van Leeuwen’s studio a continuous stream of cardboard cabinets, cupboards and wardrobes saw the light of day in the past decade, some 70 in all. Completely useless furniture, most of them, except to those that use their imagination to enter their void interiors. More recently, human and animal figures are being turned out, sometimes combined into large, intricate installations. He uses cardboard too as a mold for wonderful casts in rubber, plaster or ceramic. This leading artist in cardboard is still in love with his bride. Couzijn van Leeuwen regularly exhibits in Galerie Wit. His work found a place in many private, corporate and public collections, including those of CODA museum (Apeldoorn), Museum Boymans van Beuningen (Rotterdam) and Centraal Museum (Utrecht). It has been shown also in e.g. Anningahof (Zwolle), and Museum Flehite and Art Centre KAdE in Amersfoort.