Katharina Stadler, Overcome/Sunshower, 2023, acrylic on cotton (stitched), 145 x 170 cm (detail)
The high-contrast, bold colors of shadowy shapes and surfaces run along the fabric fields delimited by seams in Katharina Stadler's object-like paintings. Each play of color and form is able to reach the viewer immediately on an emotional level and evoke rorschach-like associations. Yet in their interconnection, the sewn and painted cotton pieces are complex collages that challenge and puzzle. Each lot is not only special and unique as a surface, but also works in a specific pictorial depth, as its own pictorial universe in which one can immerse oneself, and which nevertheless interacts and connects with the whole in a mysterious way.
Katharina Stadler's large-scale compositions are capable of evoking moments of contemplative tranquility and, at the same time, feelings of joyful lightheartedness. She imagines the colors of her works at the beginning and then lets thoughts, memories and dreams flow into the multi-part painting process. From image-formed streams of consciousness she finally puts together something new, something different. Deconstruction and re-creation can be read here as a reference to human processing with what is experienced, imagined and felt.
Not systematic or static, but consciously and visibly manual, intuitively and individually man-made, the color-intensive works of Katharina Stadler are able to touch us as viewers. The artist deals freely and unconstrained with her chosen medium as well as with the genre of painting. When she sews a frame around the color surfaces with unpainted pieces of cotton, she seems to playfully, almost cheekily, make us aware of our acquired habits of seeing and trained expectations of images. She thus creates an image around the actual picture. Background, empty space and frame at the same time, these "edge pieces" may also point us to the indispensability of the image carrier for painting, to the materiality of images in general and their multidimensionality. Despite the fact that the individual seams at least form sovereign and clearly ordering internal boundaries, one may doubt the boundaries of the whole in view of its fragmentary nature. And yet Katharina Stadler is not concerned with the conceptual. Rather, with her seemingly light, balancing compositions, she ingeniously succeeds in finding images for our often diffuse and sometimes chaotic inner worlds.
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Katharina Stadler was born in Oberhausen in 1995 and lives in Düsseldorf. From 2014 she studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, first free art with Prof. Andreas Gursky, then painting with Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. In 2021 she graduated as a master student of Prof. Thomas Scheibitz. Already in 2020, Katharina Stadler has been represented in the curated exhibition Academy POSITIONS at the POSITIONS Berlin Art Fair. With four other positions of Prof. Thomas Scheibitz's class she was presented last year in the group exhibition Accurate Glitch at Jarmuschek + Partner. HAPPY-GO-LUCKY is the first solo exhibition at the gallery.