Events/Openings

In what is now her sixth solo exhibition at Galerie koal, Katinka Pilscheur presents newly created installation objects, which, unlike her previous site-specific installations, function as works in their own right. Whilst the dimensions and proportions of the exhibition space have up to now been the starting point for installations, these individual objects represent a more intuitive and individual approach to dimensional relationships.

By creating a relationship between the works – consisting partially of construction materials – and the exhibition space, Pilscheur references her own body with relation to the surroundings, seemingly following a minimalist tradition. The catalyst for this process of finding the right form was a shipping crate for an artwork; after the artist noticed that its proportions bore some relation to her own she began analysing the outer dimensions. She discovered that the steles corresponded exactly to the dimensions of her own figure, the width and depth of her frame, the height of her torso excluding her head. The accordingly developed presentation boxes bear monochrome images on one side, turning each of them into independent display objects.

Made of aluminium or stretched canvas frames, each panel is a different size and a different colour. The sizes were calculated according to the proportions of the steles. This direct implication of the human body also echoes the proportion systems of Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man as well as Le Corbusier's Modulor.

Katinka Pilscheur intuitively selected the colours used to varnish the panels from a special colour palette designed for automobiles. Combining different colour tones and various finishes, ranging from a metallic look, to a glossy finish, to a matte surface, the artist makes use of a broad spectrum of possibilities seldom found in the street.

Unlike the Cuba series, where Katinka Pilscheur imported automobile paints from that same country, the objects in question are not charged with symbolic meaning. Here she uses paint as material in a 'Judd-like' sense, with no reference to colour theory or geographic location. Freed from requirements limiting the representational quality of paint and its use, these works enable the spatial simulation of reality on flat surfaces.

The individual steles are solitary, autonomous, existing in their own right, in relation to the artist. Yet they do not fail to take into account their environment, the White Cube of the gallery in its dimensions and proportions. The steles create a particular relationship to the space surrounding them, which in turn becomes part of each object. The distances between the individual elements and their orientation to one another take into account the viewer as well as the architecture, enabling a spatial "dialogue" and a complex system of references to develop. Made of unfinished maritime pine – also known as box plywood – and coloured panels, these individual self-referential objects evoke Donald Judd and American minimalism, yet in the clarity of their visual language do not cash in on this tradition, but rather transcend it.

The artist is dedicating the exhibition to her late father, Karl Ernst Pilscheur (1934 - 2001). One of his poems is integrated into the exhibition.