Search results for ""Karen Kilimnik" "Photographs""

Book SynopsisAfter Drawings (1997), Paintings (2001) and Kirschgarten (2005), Photographs is the fourth artist's book by the Philadelphiaborn and based Karen Kilimnik (b. 1955) to be published by Edition Patrick Frey. It brings together the sporadically exhibited and by and large unknown photographic works of the artist, who gained fame in the 1980s with her scatter art installations and later with her paintings. Karen Kilimnik takes pictures with the same gesture she paints with: an unerring sense of the glut of shiny surface beauty, under which lurk the shades of monstrous things unseen and unspoken. She takes pictures with a shrewd, informed eye. She adores kitsch, but she knows how phony it is and how much this phoniness makes it irresistible. She is a wise old soul but she's absolutely determined to preserve the innocence and vulnerability of a young and restless mind. In Bourdieu's words, her photography strikes a perfect balance between the ritual and the artistic. Kilimnik takes pictures of what she unconditionally loves, and this love is eclectic and deeply darkly romantic. She photographs idylls ad nauseam: the rolling hills of the Cotswolds in south central England, so leafy they almost seem unreal; a ladies' bicycle, hedge-lined streets, sheep in the shadow of a tree, cows in the morning mist, a squirrel that seems to be nibbling on a flower, sitting ducks on the banks of a stream. Kilimnik views profane reality through the mercilessly wide-open eyes of her camera lens, transforming it in her photographs into a stage for her fabulously dreamy / nightmarish fairytale figurations and arrangements. When reality does not suffice, she embellishes it, trimming the trees in the garden, for example, with glass Christmas ornaments or with fairy lights.

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Book SynopsisKaren Kilimnik's artist's book Early Drawings 19761998 is kind of a prequel to Kilimnik's Drawings, also published by Edition Patrick Frey in 1997. Early Drawings 19761998 brings together the artist's own rich and varied selection of around 130 never before published early works on paper. Detailed, finely worked pastel drawings created between 1976 and 1998 are presented along with ink drawings and other work from that same period; together they illuminate the scope, complexity and virtuosity of Kilimnik's thematic world. For more than forty years, Kilimnik has navigated an inexhaustible cosmos influenced by the traditions of Romantic painting, portraiture, and landscape painting. Her work gives equal weight to a broad array of subject matter, finding inspiration in such diverse sources as popular culture and fairy tales, Old Master paintings and television programs, films, literature, magazines, advertising, as well as window displays. The result dissolves the distinctions between high and low culture. This creative mixture appears in some of Kilimnik's earliest output: after studying art and architecture in Philadelphia, the artist exhibited a series of genre-bending constellations in the mid-1980s and early 1990s; assembled works included paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and films. Her oeuvre explores themes of mythology and femininity, history and fiction. Early Drawings 19761998 is published on the occassion of a double exhibition bearing the same title at Galerie Eva Presenhuber in New York and at Sprüth Magers in London, which was shown in early summer 2022.

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