Katinka Theis
by sleek team & filed under Berlin, Studio visits
Katinka Theis. Photo © Maxime Ballesteros
An artist with a relentlessly “constructionalistic impulse”, Katinka Theis works in the space between sculpture and architecture. Transforming structures from the world around her with the help of photo collage, objects and installations, she recontextualises them in what she terms a “new scenery”. Ranging from small-scale sculptures such as the geometric wall piece “Pyrite Architecture” to larger interventions in public space, she analyses the “relationship between the political system and the individual human being”. Her desire for a “free spirit to live” led her to Berlin and says she now feels at home working from her former hairdresser’s shop studio in Prenzlauer Berg.
Fittingly for an artist based in the architectural palimpsest that is Berlin, her interest in the postwar modernist structures of East and West guide her sensibility, and draw her to the aesthetics of minimalism and Russian constructivism. Holding a mirror to the political context in which a building was once imagined and then refracting it through her own contemporary perspective, she creates collages that act as a “topography” combining “spatial pattern, atmosphere and personal experience… all the images show situations with new correlations that have been changed by utopian imagination.”
katinkatheis.de
Text by Susanna Davies-Crook
Email
Print