Katharina Arndt
While waiting for Death
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Lorena Juan, Larissa Kikol, Stacie McCormick, Blake Palmer |
| Design | Book Book |
| Size | 20 x 27,5 cm |
| Cover | Otabind |
| Pages | 160 |
| Illustrations | 80 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-212-9 |
Life for the most part consists of banalities. What to make of it? Katharina Arndt has decided to dip thick brushes into luminous bold acrylic paints, which she applies expansively without regard for the ostensible gray areas of life. Every stroke is valid, there’s no remorse or trepidation, everything is foreground, all elements of a picture are equipollent. The people in Arndt’s paintings from 2022–23 gathered in this catalog are simply there, for the moment, gaping into their cell phones, stuffing themselves with burgers. Nothing more. That makes her works distorted depictions of our hedonistic society with its craving for sensuality, even as we always have one eye riveted on the virtual. The harder, then, to face up to physical reality; with all photo filters off, its imperfections are unmistakable. And so, although we clearly delight in these gaudy colors, the pictures contain intimations of melancholy and death, too. Knowing that the hour of farewell is near, Arndt’s figures stimulate their senses. They kill time down to the very end with jarring trivia, agitated Sisyphuses wallowing in their glittering inadequacy.
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Post-reunification Germany has emerged as an important forum for international painting. The generation of artists born in the 1970s and 1980s eschew alignment with collective tendencies and resist clearly definable influences. Meanwhile, their art has registered the cultural and sociological dislocations and divergences since the fall of the Iron Curtain with seismographic precision.
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Maria Braune
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René Holm
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Philip Loersch
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Julia Steiner
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HALBwertsZeit
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Jorinde Voigt
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auf Erkundung
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