ART-CITIES:London-Karen Kilimnik
For her new exhibition, Karen Kilimnik has created a group of small-scale paintings based mostly on appropriated images, many of these from traditional Delftware, which she suffuses with her own imaginative preoccupations. The resulting body of work, made over the past two years, expresses the artist’s enduring qualities of openness and precision, elegance and humour.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
Kilimnik’s engagement with history is visible in all her new artworks, the painting “reconnaissance – a country house in Polish countryside” depicts a road that narrows into the vanishing point of the picture, bordered by rows of trees, all in a range of cobalt blues. Although the landscape could be a country road anywhere in the world, and was probably based on a painting from the Dutch Golden Age, Kilimnik imagined the scene as an escape across Poland amid the tumult of World War II, overlaying the found image with a new narrative that reflects the artist’s interest in history. There is also an important interplay of scale, format and genre in the ‘Delftware’ work. Even while “the dutch water scene”, for example, retains the size, shape and palette of a Delftware plate, the new painting restores the emphasis on actual landscape. Kilimnik reinstates the painterly surface and atmospheric effects we expect of landscape painting while retaining the object-like scale and shape of the plate. Kilimnik brings the same process of conversion and ambiguity to her ‘tapestry’ paintings. In “the green faerie’s cottage in the tapestry”, we see a fairy-tale realm that Kilimnik derived from a tapestry, yet the new painting introduces a degree of depth and vividness to the landscape that the original lacked. This intrusion of the imaginative into history, or the present day into the past, reaches its playful best in the “Fairy cleaning the copper pot with Fairy Dish Soap”. When the artist first came to England, the name of a common household product captivated her: ‘Fairy’ washing-up liquid. The soap seemed to infuse the mundane act of scrubbing dishes with the fantastic. The painting, based on a Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin still life, shows a ghost-like fairy figure, right arm aloft and a wand in hand. Behind, the copper pot sparkles as if freshly cleaned. The painting gives the viewer a direct encounter with the unguarded verve of the artist’s wit, always balanced by her assured sense of colour and form.These new artworks give the viewer a direct encounter with the unguarded verve of the artist’s wit, always balanced by her assured sense of colour and form.
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 7A Grafton Street, London, Duration: 20/5-20/6/15, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat: 10:00-18:00, http://spruethmagers.com
