Kitty Kraus
09 Apr - 15 May 2011
Kitty Kraus, Ohne Titel, 2009, Glas, zweiteilig, 50x74 cm, 39x125 cm. Courtesy Galerie Neu, Berlin
Kitty Kraus, Ohne Titel, 2005, Zündholz, Tesafilm, 5x0,2x0,2 cm, Courtesy Galerie Neu, Berlin
At first glance Kitty Kraus’s exhibitions appear to be austere, ordered and cold. Industrially prefabricated products, such as glass, mirrors, lights, but also texts and ice cubes, are arranged in spatial installations in a way that can be deceptive to the viewer, because it is not primarily formalism that interests Kitty Kraus.
Exhibition visitors to the Studio are greeted by a work created in 2006 in which Kitty Krauss combines different historical and modern sources using a copy-and-paste technique. The sentences, mostly taken from the internet, contain medical, literary, legal and philosophical reflections surrounding the act of decapitation. What is also central here is the shared etymological root of the German word “Kopf” (meaning “head”) and “capital” (the Latin word “caput”). The dense text – which, as stressed by the artist, “originates from many heads” and is deconstructed into individual slices and recombined anew – never ends, it disappears gradually through the mechanical deconstruction of the letters, determined by the process of the ink in the printer cartridges running dry.
A recurring image in the work of Kitty Kraus is the body to which something basic has been lost, which is still present in its materiality, but is on the cusp of SELF-DISSOLUTION. In the glass works created over the last few years the artist uses industrially prefabricated sheets of glass, which she has had cut into specific dimensions based on the human body. The visual presence of the transparent material primarily emerges through outlines, delineated by the unpolished edges of the glass. However the central motif remains invisible to the eye – if there is something to see it is the reflection of the viewer on the smooth surfaces or in the surrounding space.
In the work of Kitty Kraus it seems as if the belief in the permanence and truth of particular materials, forms, proportions and rules is bent out of shape, as if material and form might collapse under the weight of their individual conditions. Born in Heidelberg in 1976, Kitty Kraus moved to Berlin to study philosophy and art, from where she rapidly entered the art world. A solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York is just one of many international signs that an exhibition of her works in her home town is long overdue. The exhibition in The Studio of the Kunstverein presents, among other pieces, a version of the work “Dekaputkapitalisation” described above, as well as works in glass.
Exhibition visitors to the Studio are greeted by a work created in 2006 in which Kitty Krauss combines different historical and modern sources using a copy-and-paste technique. The sentences, mostly taken from the internet, contain medical, literary, legal and philosophical reflections surrounding the act of decapitation. What is also central here is the shared etymological root of the German word “Kopf” (meaning “head”) and “capital” (the Latin word “caput”). The dense text – which, as stressed by the artist, “originates from many heads” and is deconstructed into individual slices and recombined anew – never ends, it disappears gradually through the mechanical deconstruction of the letters, determined by the process of the ink in the printer cartridges running dry.
A recurring image in the work of Kitty Kraus is the body to which something basic has been lost, which is still present in its materiality, but is on the cusp of SELF-DISSOLUTION. In the glass works created over the last few years the artist uses industrially prefabricated sheets of glass, which she has had cut into specific dimensions based on the human body. The visual presence of the transparent material primarily emerges through outlines, delineated by the unpolished edges of the glass. However the central motif remains invisible to the eye – if there is something to see it is the reflection of the viewer on the smooth surfaces or in the surrounding space.
In the work of Kitty Kraus it seems as if the belief in the permanence and truth of particular materials, forms, proportions and rules is bent out of shape, as if material and form might collapse under the weight of their individual conditions. Born in Heidelberg in 1976, Kitty Kraus moved to Berlin to study philosophy and art, from where she rapidly entered the art world. A solo exhibition at the Guggenheim in New York is just one of many international signs that an exhibition of her works in her home town is long overdue. The exhibition in The Studio of the Kunstverein presents, among other pieces, a version of the work “Dekaputkapitalisation” described above, as well as works in glass.