Karin Andersen

Maniero, Rome
Through November 4

For several years now, German artist Karin Andersen has lived and worked in Italy. Her most recent pieces - digital prints on canvas – are included in the exhibition Zoopatia, in Rome. In them, Andersen continues to develop an art whose theme lies somewhere between a search for individual identity and the inventive re-elaboration of well-known places.

Right from the start of the exhibition, it’s easy to see the influence of cinema in her work, especially in her approach to framing shots. The paintings appear like a story or film screenplay – a fairytale in the best Nordic tradition. The images, taken ‘directly’ from reality or completely imaginary, reveal a perspective that is both personal and impersonal. Characters and objects are depicted in sets of varying size and length that intertwine elements such as imaginary future worlds, cloning and organic mutation.

They grapple with the natural confines dividing human from animal, body from spirit, earth from cosmos. In Zoopatia it is easy to identify, among the more inventive images, some of Andersen’s teenage idols, such as David Bowie’s Space Oddity. There are also references to news stories from the artist’s childhood that captured the public imagination, like the tale of Laika, the first dog to go to the moon.

In drawing so closely on cinematic sources, Karin Andersen’s idyllic world doesn’t hide its fictitious nature: the space-time categories are carefully planned, the characters invented. On the other hand, the artist sets her characters in real, easily identified environments such as a butcher’s storeroom, a space ship launch pad, or a shop window.

In these spaces, Andersen not only depicts the crazy creations of her imagination. She also portrays herself, sometimes interpreting one of her characters, or turning herself into one of the obsessively reproduced decorative elements on her canvases.




Angelo Capasso
Translation by Rosalind Furness