PRESENTATION: Karen Kilimnik-Early Drawings 1976-1998

In a practice that draws upon the tradition of Romantic painting, Karen Kilimnik utilizes painting, drawing, collage, photography, video and installation to produce nuanced and playful observations of historical codes and symbols. Reveling in both mass and high culture, George Stubbs, Jean-Baptiste Oudry and the ballet are as important for Kilimnik as The Avengers, Kate Moss and pop music, forcing such distinctions to collapse into her own specific mélange of cultural influence and production.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive

The exhibition “Early Drawings 1976-1998”, features Karen Kilimnik’s early works on paper. Detailed, finely-worked pastel drawings created between 1976 to 1998 are presented along with ink drawings and other work from that same period; together they illuminate the scope, complexity and virtuosity of Kilimnik’s thematic world. For more than forty years, Kilimnik has navigated an inexhaustible cosmos influenced by the traditions of Romantic painting, portraiture, and landscape painting. Her work gives equal weight to a broad array of subject matter, finding inspiration in such diverse sources as popular culture and fairy tales, Old Master paintings and television programmes, films, literature, magazines, advertising, as well as window displays. The result dissolves the distinctions between “high” and “low” culture. This creative mixture appears in some of Kilimnik’s earliest output: after studying art and architecture in Philadelphia, the artist exhibited a series of genre-bending constellations in the mid -1980s and early 1990s; assembled works included paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and films. Her oeuvre explores themes of mythology and femininity, history and fiction. Especially Kilimnik’s drawings and collages often emerge from general observation and contemplation. Exemplifying that approach is a drawing of a red sports car from the year 1979, “car rally Avengers £50,000 breakfast, vrrooomm!” inspired by the 1960s British TV series The Avengers – a recurring motif that appears in a number of other works as well – it shows the vehicle speeding past forests, a person wearing black leather gloves at the wheel. The piece depicts a particular scene from the series involving a car rally; it finds Kilimnik, whose juvenile career considerations included becoming a race car driver, drawing imagery from the world of popular culture.

Karen Kilimnik studied art and architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia. In the early 1990s she created installations in the American genre of scatter art: found objects assembled and disseminated on the ground in seemingly random fashion with no particular formal intention. In 1990 she participated in group exhibitions at Stux Gallery in New York. The following year her large installation “I Don’t Like Mondays, the Boomtown Rats, Shooting Spree or Schoolyard Massacre” (1991) referenced a school shooting as well as a title of a Boomtown Rats’ song. In this work the artist scattered pistols, rifles and a stereo on the ground, and attaching targets of human silhouettes on the wall, with traces of red paint alluding to the massacre. However, K. Kilimnik became known for her drawings and paintings. She produces small- and large-format oil paintings in which she explores themes of gender and subjects from the history of 18th-century art with a revisionism influenced by the pop culture of mass media. In 2005 her solo exhibitions at the Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation in Venice and the Haus Zum Kirschgarten in Basel she camouflaged her “historic” paintings in the original 18th-century decor of the buildings creating interplay of references. Fascinated by the media, the life of celebrities and success stories, K. Kilimnik dove into a universe of dreams and magic. Fairy tales and the universe of dance are also part of her iconographic vocabulary. In 2007 an exhibition of her work took place in several American museums as well as at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and at the Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2008 she participated in the Whitney Biennial in New York.

Photo: Karen Kilimnik, Lambeth walk, London Thames & Houses of Parlament, 1978, Ink and watercolor on paper, 21.5 × 28 cm, 8 1/2 × 11 inches, © Karen Kilimnik Courtesy the artist, Sprüth Magers and Galerie Eva Presenhuber

Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, 7A Grafton St., London, United Kingdom, duration: 8/4-21/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-sat 10:00-18:00, https://spruethmagers.com