Modern women cry modern women don't cry. Solo exhibition. Crude in execution and refusing to limit herself to a particular medium or style, the artist' work whilst refreshingly independent is self conscious and aware of it's own art history.
Another Roadside Attraction Gallery is please to announce the first UK solo
exhibition of Karen Koltrane.
Uninterested in the art worlds, emphasis on career, fashion and signature,
Karen Koltranes work is difficult to locate within current critical
practice. Though she refutes the term Outsider art in consideration of her
work, there are perhaps some parallels in approach and method, if not in
intention. Crude in execution and refusing to limit herself to a particular
medium or style, her work whilst refreshingly independent is self conscious
and aware of it's own art history. Her approach in its multiplicity is
perhaps indicative of our age, but her emphasis is on a developed change and
examination of the fractured self, rather than the shallow pursuit of the
new. Sporadic in her output, she has been known to destroy whole bodies of
work on its completion or as she states unresolved conclusion.
Discussions on Karen Koltrane, invariably emphasis the autobiographical
elements of her work and the now tired story of, her troubled childhood, her
career as a dancer, her connections with Sonic Youth and the New York art
set and her late start in the arts under the guidance of Robert Gober.
Though important to her practice; her use of biographic detail is more akin
to Federico Fellini than Tracey Emin, using it as a springboard for her
imagination rather than a set of parameters to work within. Never limited by
verisimilitude, her work intertwines fiction with reality, to create a loose
narrative that has often been compared to the literary style of magic
realism. Her interest in the macabre, popular horror and film noir also
filters through her work to produce a haunting malaise, which although
melancholic is not without optimism. Through creative invention, her work
examines the mythology of history, the subjectiveness of truth and the
instability of the authentic.
Karen Koltrane has been exhibited widely in America and Europe including
solo shows for Soho 19, New York, Flame Gallery, New York, Musterberg
Gallery, San Francisco. She recently took part in a group exhibition in
Berlin at Kunstklu that used her work Provoking Ghost, as it central theme
and will be co-curating the exhibition Schlock Horror, at Another Roadside
Attraction Gallery in the autumn.
Preview Friday 13th Feb 6.30 9pm
Another Roadside Attraction Gallery
Bayford Street - London
Open Fri - Sun 12 - 6pm or by appointment
Free admission