KARIN VÖLKER   

BORN: Kierspe, Germany - 1958

Lives and works in Berlin, Germany

 

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in 1958 in Kierspe, Germany, Karin Voelker studied art at the College of Fine Art in Berlin and has pursued her passion for painting as a professional artist living and working in Berlin.

Karin Voelker’s creative works reflect a pleasure in powerful dance-like movement. Her focus is on naked and dancing figures full of energy and tension. The observer experiences how movement is sensuously felt and recreated as an intimate moment of a fleeting impression.

The focal point of her pictures is the language of the body.  The artist varies her technique by using rags in addition to pens, fine-tipped brushes and wide brushes.  This means that, along with contours that delineate or insinuate forms, we also see forms which, through the interplay of light and dark areas, leave fold-like structures on the canvas that seem to create their own pictorial space.  This, in conjunction with elements of spraying techniques as an aleatory mode of expression, as well as the bleeding together of colors on the canvas, gives each picture a more varied language of forms than those found in previous works.  Since the perspective aspect of spatiality is increasingly reduced and the language of forms tends more and more toward the two-dimensional plane, to some extent the impression of a collage like composition of pictorial elements is created. In all of these pictures the ratio of quiet elements to restless elements has shifted in favor of the moving ones.  It is the phenomenological stream of thoughts of which consciousness is composed – that is, the continual movement of thoughts that have externalized themselves and cover and register the body in a way that makes the silence seem suspended.  And yet, it is preserved.

Another consistent feature of the artist’s representations is a touch of sensuality.  This drive-theory-related aspect, actually a prerequisite of good art, permeates the pictures in the form of a specific artistic sensitivity, for which Freud once invented the concept of sublimation.

In her mixed media works on paper, the artist becomes lyrical.  Here moods are released, but in a way that is different from that of impressionism or expressionism.  The female bodies, partially abstracted, merge in a different way with matter.  In a manner unique to the artist, they become transparent, and one with a nature that is in the process of losing its spatiality.  Pictures of a – we might say – meditative feeling.

Karin Voelker no longer works with a model. Her imagination defines the setting for the canvas. In her works on paper, she has developed her own particular technique. The sketch-like experimental mixed technique is frequently based on luminescent stain worked over with sweeping virtuoso pen-and-ink drawings, which in turn are overlapped by coats of oil color. Watercolor like glazing and pasty coats alternate; they are wiped furiously, dabbed, destroyed and rediscovered.

 

BIOGRAPHY

1958                Born in Kierspe, Germany

1978-1984       Studies at College of Fine Art, Berlin, Germany

From 1985      Works as designer and free-lance artist in Berlin

Since 1998      Independent artist in Berlin, Germany

2001                Focused on art studies in Umbria, Italy

 

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

What is most important to me is to feel that I am working freely. The courage to destroy is part of it. I try to see each moment of the creative process without preconceived notions.  I am ready to see my work in a new light and I am open to surprises.

 

SOLO EXHIBITIONS

1994                Bellevue Gallery, Berlin, Germany

1995                Spectrum Gallery, Hamburg, Germany

1997                Spectrum Gallery, Hamburg, Germany

1998                Art-Sud Gallery, Toulouse, France

1999                Zandi Gallery, Berlin, Germany

2000                Sophien Edition Gallery, Berlin, Germany

2001                Ednubalk Gallery, Aachen, Germany

2002                Sophien Edition Gallery, Berlin, Germany

Artfair Kunstmarkt  Dresden

 Hart Gallery, California (G.E.)

Kunsthaus Hohmann, Walsrode (S.E.)

2003                Turmgalerie, Helmstedt (S.E.)

Salle Roger Corbeau, Haguenau,France (S.E.)

 Hart Gallery, Chicago (S.E.)

2004                Hart Gallery, Carmel,California (S.E.) 

Hart Gallery, Palm Desert, California (S.E.)

2005                Galerie  Art gluchowe, Glauchau (S.E.)

Galerie Sophien-Edition, Berlin (S.E.)

2006                Hart Gallery, Palm Desert,California (S.E) 

Galerie  Hyna, Rottach-Egern (G.E)