Katrin Korfmann
Umeå, 19.4–25.5 2012
Galleri Andersson/Sandström is proudly presenting a solo exhibition with the Dutch-German artist Katrin Korfmann. Korfmann is a critically acclaimed, multi-faceted artist with photography as a base for further explorations. In front of her large-scale photographs, the viewer is positioned in the air, looking down on a street scene below. And while there is a high degree of recognition in the details of human life and its pace, the result is quite structural and the composition formal. Korfmann is transforming real landscapes into cubist flat planes.
Kofmann’s imagery is a result of a systematic process of alteration. She travels to specific locations anywhere in the world. There, she selects a limited area to photograph, which will become the “stage” of the future image, where people go in and out. Transit areas are especially fitting, railway stations, airports and squares. Everyday life is invited to partake in the images and accidental results are welcome. But the end result, presented in this exhibition, has undergone much alteration.
A finished work is developed from multiple shots, digitally processed and merged together into visual collages. The perspective has been shifted, from frontal to aerial vantage points. Space is distorted and authenticity disrupted. And while there is a seemingly real sense of a frozen moment in time, it is purely a result of our learnt perception of photography. A perception Korfmann is playing with when she, in one single frame and spatial arrangement is visualizing different sequential incidents, registered within a given period and location. Not far from a cinematic experience.
In her dynamic artistic fashion Korfmann is unifying multiple arrays of world perspectives. There is neutrality here, objectivity, a notion of one society. The wide-spread locations from all over the world, somehow share equal visual elements. Humans move, socialize and are in fact, tiny. Seen from above, we are all alike. However, there is frailty here too. The specks of human bodies positioned against the background Korfmann refers to as “space zero”, also is unveiling that even while sharing a social system, walking on the same square, standing in the same lines, we are islands of separate existences.
Korfmann is dedicating her artistic voice to the investigations of time, perception of space and memory, and the behavior of people, both as individuals and as part of a flock. And as part of such, from Korfmanns lens, we are all potential dots on a monochrome background.
Katrin Korfmann, born 1971 in Berlin, lives and works in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. After studying at Kunsthochschule Berlin and Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, she continued her studies with residencies at Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Cittadellarte in Biella and Akademie der Kunste in Berlin. She has won several art awards, including the Mama Cash Award in 2000, Prix de Rome in 2003 and Rado Star Prize Switzerland 2012. Since the late nineties she has had an extensive exhibition schedule, showing works at home and abroad in galleries, museums, alternative art institutions and public spaces.