Alien Nation, Head and Hand x Roger confronted with himself
2021, sculpture made of 2 wooden panels, oil painted on 250 cm x 180 cm x 1 cm poplar wood
1970 * in Gütersloh, Germany, grew up in Austria, Stmk
1993-95 Social Academy Vienna
1995-99 Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with Sue Williams and Wolfgang Hollegha
2002 State Scholarship for Fine Arts / Women's Art Prize / Anton Faistauer Prize
2003 Georg Eisler Prize
2020 Klinkan Prize
Since 2017 Band Kinky Muppet
Since 2022 Professorship for Painting and Drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart
Political painting in the post-factual age
While postmodern painting has always been accompanied by the discussion about its end, it always refers to its most important characteristic: that thanks to its discursive character, it can span a never-ending network of representations. Thirty-five years ago, the painter Thomas Lawson found the apt word for it "Last Exit: Painting". The same applies to the works of Katrin Plavčak (born 1970 in Gütersloh, raised in Austria). Her oil and acrylic paintings, which are not painted in paste, call up figurative references to Dix and Grosz, Magritte and Picasso, Höch and Lassnig, as well as the prac-tice of naïve painting, in which perspectival and spatial conditions are suspended and several narra-tive strands coexist. In doing so, Katrin Plavčak specifically engages with the history of images that originate from comics, caricature, illustration and, more generally, technical visual media. Cliché, distortion, trivialisation and spectacle, as produced by the media industry and to whose logic art and its institutions are naturally also susceptible, form an aesthetic fund for her from which she formulates her artistic and socio-political view of things with her own painterly language in a highly skilful transformation process.
Katrin Plavčak needs neither pathos nor an ideologically "correct" position; rather, she directly fol-lows her interest in Dada or Surrealism, art movements in which the achievements of photography, film and advertising, and thus not least popular magazine culture in methodical interweaving with montage and collage, helped to determine the avant-garde concept. Moreover, Katrin Plavčak is a great portraitist who knows how to bring the characteristics of her found or invented figures psy-chologically to the point with great painterly skill. So if the post-factual age is being proclaimed these days because "we are drowning in information to the point where it becomes meaningless to us", as Lawson put it in 1981, then the antithesis could be art that is prepared to explore explicitly political as well as mythical dimensions. Critical, resistant distance arises in this medium as if by itself, when space is created on the canvas for complex facts, ideas and feelings in a highly conden-sed form.
(Andreas Balze)
Fischmeerwesen im Flammenmeer | Phantomspeisung | Fishing Amateurs
each 2023, oil on cotton, each 150 x 150 cm
The funeral of Werner Korn
2023, oil on cotton, 150 x 120 cm
Ausstellungen
A selection of recent projects
2023 Orchestra Vertical, aluminium and steel silhouettes - wall installation, in the skyscraper The One, St. Marx, Vienna
2022 What happened in the digital Hood? Heilbronn Art Association (D)
DIgiTAL BLooD, electroperette, composition Annesley Black and KINKY MUPPET, premiere 7 April 2022 at Kunstverein Heilbronn
2021 Am Rand der Stadt, mural in collaboration with Esther Stocker, Oberlaa, Vienna
Peinture naïve, Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva (CH)
2020 History never stops, mural (2,5 x 55m) for the Nye Jordal Amfi ice hockey stadium, Oslo (NO)
Rochus Pumpernickel (Pneu Objekt) NOW / Esterhazy Contemporary, Eisenstadt (A)
A Hairy Line, Kunstverein Eisenstadt together with Kata Tranker, Eisenstadt (A)
2019 Haus der Lose / House of Lots, Stanley Picker Gallery (Exhibition) & Visconti Studio (Re-cording Session) Kingston University, London
2018 Monument to Falco - Art in Public Space Lower Austria / Gansbach (A)
On the Couch, Schwartzsche Villa / Kommunale Galerie Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Berlin
2016 The Man with a Woman's Head, Galerie Mezzanin, Geneva (CH)
2014 The Television Hand, Kunstverein Kreis Gütersloh, Gütersloh (D)
2009 Human or Other, Secession Vienna
Some group exhibitions
2023 On Stage - Art as Stage, mumok - Museum of Modern Art, Vienna
Ridiculously Yours! Art, Awkwardness and Enthusiasm, Falckenberg Collection, Deich-torhallen, Hamburg and Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, 2022 (D)
Neue Galerie Graz and Halle für Kunst Steiermark, 2023 (A)
2022 HEDY LAMARR - THE STRANGE WOMAN, La Galerie - Centre d'Art Contemporain de Noisy-Le-Sec, Paris
2021 The Attack of the Present / Prospects in Post-Growth, University Gallery at Heiligenkreuzer Hof (University of Applied Arts Vienna).
2019 Alphabet of the Anarchist Amateur, < rotor >, Steirischer Herbst 2019, Graz (A)
Good Space - Communities or the Promise of Happiness, Villa Merkel, Esslingen (D)
2015 Better than de Kooning, Villa Merkel, Galleries of the City of Esslingen, Esslingen (D)
2013 painting forever! Deutsche Bank KunstHalle and KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Ana-ly-sing (with Gelitin), Schinkelpavillion, Berlin
2011 Sense and Sensibility, Salzburger Kunstverein, (A)
Captain Pamphile Show, Falckenberg Collection - Deichtorhallen Hamburg (D)
2010 Triennale Linz 1.0 / OK Linz (A)
take me to your leader! Museum of Contemporary Art Oslo and Bergen Art Museum, 2011 (NO)
2009 Scissors-Stone-Paper, Pop-Music as Subject of Visual Art, Kunsthaus Graz
2002 Here is there 2, Secession, Vienna
Lieber Maler, male mir..., Radical Realism after Picabia, Kunsthalle Wien