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15/11/2007

Karen Kilimnik

Monika Spruth Philomene Magers, Koln

Monika Spruth and Philomene Magers are delighted to present the first solo exhibition by Karen Kilimnik at their Cologne gallery. The exhibition comprises works on paper, photographs and new oil paintings. As in her last solo exhibition at the London gallery, Kilimnik is also showing an installation of a forest, in this case a fairytale birch forest in winter.

The artist for one uses well-known historical cliches; for another she cites the present in her installations. A sense of the artificial, of staging, is characteristic of her work. Since the 1990s she has been seen as a precursor for this kind of theatrical mise-en-scene installation art.

She repeatedly resorts to the aesthetics of nineteenth-century European culture for her installations, which she stages inter alia in their original historical settings. In this way she combines genre painting and historical events with contemporary pop culture and thereby with her own experience. The fantastic, fairytale-like, recurring references to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Romantics, and the proximity to painters like Stubbs, Oudry and Raeburn are significant for her painting. She habitually and masterfully breaches her own painterly style and the flawlessness that is inherent to her installations by inserting moments of shock and irritation that usually take the form of arrangements made of cheap disposable material.

A crystal glass chandelier in the first part of the space sets the scene for Karen Kilimnik's oil paintings, photographs and drawings right at the start of the exhibition. Unlike in her earlier shows, in this exhibition she does not work with colored wallpapers or walls that she includes in her installations as an artistic element. Her approach to the architecture of the rooms at the Cologne gallery is more restrained. She leaves the walls of the exhibition space and the frames of her paintings neutral in color, for example.

In Kilimnik's new photo work "The Snow Queen's Sleigh" we see a sledge laden with presents that has been left in a snow-clad winter forest. The subject of this photograph points to the allover installation in the next space. What we see there is a partly snow-covered birch forest populated by creatures such as an Arctic fox and an eagle owl. Both are based on the real animals but stylised and made of fabric. The installation creates contrasting moods and condensed dreamlike scenes by using both real tree trunks and authentic forest noises and also artificial snow and stuffed animals. Happiness, pleasure, the mysterious and the sinister all appear here in Kilimnik's mise-en-scene as protagonists with equal rights. Kilimnik's artistry of visual seduction by means of the romantically sublime is something that she herself foils time and again in a flash with elements of a raw reality fed from the present and from her own experience.

The US artist Karen Kilimnik lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. Her work has been seen in major solo exhibitions. The first comprehensive survey of her work in the US had been taken place this summer at the Philadelphia Institute of Contemporary Art, then travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami. From December 2007 through February 2008 it will be shown at the Aspen Art Museum and afterwards at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago.

Monika Sprueth Philomene Magers Cologne
Wormser Strasse 23 - Cologne
opening hours: Tuesday - Friday, 10am - 1pm and 3pm - 6pm; Saturday 11am - 4pm and by appointment
Free admission

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