Introduction

From her first paintings (whose enamelled and waxy aspect they reserved for surfaces and complexions played with the ambiguity between the real and the artificial) to her most recent drawings with coloured ink, Katharina Ziemke builds a strange universe, cultivating doubts about the nature of the subjects and giving to see the mutability of the image. On this point, the series in India ink initiated in 2013 added a new disorder in vision: the variation and dilution of figures. Among them, the one dedicated to Hamlet (fifteen portraits of the actor Laurence Olivier in town costume) unfolds like a long sequence without action, whose only movement would be that of the alteration of the image and the infinity of the variations that these successive versions suppose.

At the same time, a meeting offered Katharina Ziemke the opportunity to give a new dimension to her research. The director Thomas Ostermeier invited her to collaborate on the creation of sets for Un ennemi du peuple by Isben (Schaubühne, Berlin, 2012), then The Seagull by Tchekov (Toneelgroep, Amsterdam, 2013) and Professor Bernhardi by Arthur Schnitzler (Schaubühne, Berlin / Les Gémeaux, Sceaux, 2017). For The Seagull, the artist imagined large drawings inspired by his inks on paper, which an operator made live during the show. Hiding from each scene, the image was here less a setting than a protagonist of the story: it imposed itself as action.

A new technique that appeared in Katharina Ziemke's work further synthesizes her interest in the spectacle of the active image. Initially applying solid pastel colours to the paper, the artist then covers the whole with a layer of black wax, which she finally digs in the manner of an engraver to let dark images dawn and as if worried by strange coloured spectra. Like a vision on another, the glimpse of a hallucinated world, hidden under the appearances of our daily life.

Thibault Bissirier, 2018

Katharina ZIEMKE was born in Kiel (Germany) in 1979. She now lives and works in Berlin, where she settled after her studies at the Ecole Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris (Joël Kermarrec studio).
His works have been exhibited in Berlin (Schaubühne, Galerie Susanne Albrecht, Manzoni Schäper), Kiel (Kunstraum B), Copenhagen (Galerie Benoni and Galerie Christoffer Egelund), Luxembourg (Nosbaum & Reding), New York and Paris (Galerie Zürcher). In France, Katharina Ziemke has also participated in several group exhibitions in Lyon (Espace arts plastiques de Vénissieux), Bourges (La Box), Montbéliard (CRAC) Toulouse (Printemps de septembre), or Meymac (CAC), as well as at the Musée de l'Abbaye Sainte-Croix aux Sables d'Olonne, where she was the subject of an important solo exhibition in 2008. Her works are today present in the collections of the FNAC - Fonds National d'Art Contemporain.