Page 226 - Museum

KATRIN ALVAREZ

Lives and works in Cologne, Germany
www.katrin-alvarez.de

Gerhard Habarta, gallery manager, curator, author and publisher,
founder of the PhantastenMuseum in Vienna at Palais Palffy. The art
of the moment, of the immediate, is dominated by a great tendency
to verbosity. All those annuals and biennales are packed with speech
bubbles so as to conceal a lack of pleasure in art. Not only pleasure, but
fear, longings, memories, injuries and damage caused by co-existence
with other humans, a co-existence that can be sublimated through art.
None of this has any value in instant art. ‘Life’ is replaced by political
tirades, in the same way that action and reaction to life is replaced by
tirades in the political sphere.

These emotions in life are more deeply buried under layers of theoretical
constructs than Sigmund Freud’s ‘old and dirty gods’ were buried in the
debris of civilizations. The painter and illustrator Katrin Alvarez is an
excavator. She reveals to us the pieces in life’s puzzle. With apparently
unconnected material she highlights the interconnections by creating
the transitional areas of impulsivity and instability in interpersonal
relationships, in moods and in self-image, as it is called in the literature of
clinical psychology. Her picture in Vienna’s PhantastenMuseum collection
is tellingly called ‘Borderline’.

The artist used to work as a journalist, and so one might dismiss her works
as reflections on an investigative assignment. But that’s not what they are.


WHISTLEBLOWER, 2013 OIL ON CANVAS 40.5X48X1.5 IN. | 104X122X5 CM.
 MYTH / MYTHOS, 2014 OIL AN BOARD 33.5X25.5X1.5 IN. | 85X65X3,5 CM.
BROKEN DREAMS / ZERBROCHENE TRÄUME, 2011 OIL ON CANVAS AND OBJECT 49X43X2 IN. |
125X110X6 CM. 

They are universally valid comments on the transitional area between
the outer world and the inner world. Unlike other painters in the fantastic
art genre who seek their subjects in mythological legend or who see
themselves as visionaries or healers creating their own natural religion
in paint, Alvarez paints pictures of psychotraumatology ...”.

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