Traces

Katrin Laade

Thursday, 5.5.2022 from 5 – 9 p.m.

in my gallery, Grupellostr.8, 40210 Düsseldorf, Germany

Duration of the exhibition from 6.5. – 12.6.2022

Visit by appointment 0172-2629069

With this new exhibition under the title “Traces” I am pleased to present for the first time in my rooms works of the artist Katrin Laade.

Katrin Laade is a native of Stuttgart and studied with Jan Dibbets at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She then received postgraduate studies at the prestigious academy “de ateliers” in Haarlem, the Netherlands. She then lived in Amsterdam until 2005, when she moved back to Düsseldorf. Here she lives and works. She had a teaching position at the Folkwang University and currently teaches painting at the University of Duisburg-Essen until 2020.

She paints abstract large-format pictures. Her works, however, differ on closer inspection very clearly from works of abstract expressionist American paintings such as thev New York School of the 40s and 60s. Also, her paintings are not with the German Informel of an Emil Schumacher or the Italian abstract painter Emilio Vedova to compare or classify.

Katrin Laade has decided for herself a very own processual way, in which she creates her images first structurally sketchy on the canvas.  Her templates are figurative motifs that can also have contemporary references. In several phases of work, these templates are not painted over step by step, but the pre-formulated sketches with adhesive strips to outlines into a new visual structure, which is then painted in surface, before the result is a picture that in its abstraction no longer has anything to do with the original image template. In contrast to spontaneous abstract painting, her working method is subject to a conception, a basic idea, an occasion, which she does not lose sight of. It is structurally developed in a planned and colorful manner. The curious viewer no longer recognizes the occasion and a pictorial decoding seems impossible.

That is the exciting, the unique thing about her works, to deconstruct a picture by successive working steps and to transfer it into an abstract new dimension. Because that’s what it’s all about, creating images that, through their visual stimuli, create an incentive to experience painting and image in a completely new way.

Whereas in the past the informalists wanted to prevent any chance of a recognizable object in their paintings, Katrin Laade clearly goes beyond this demarcation through her deconstruction of the template, thereby creating new formal language and pictorial experience that make assignment impossible. A very nice article by Thomas Hirsch on Katrin Laade’s work has also just been pubilished in the new issue of Biograph Magazine:

https://www.biograph.de/katrin-laade