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Stadtgalerie Klagenfurt
Karen Irmer – dauerhaft flüchtig
15.09.2021.- 7.11.2021

Opening: 14:09.
7 pm

In 2020, the scholarship for artistic photography and electronic media, which is offered annually by the Province of Carinthia in cooperation with the Department of Culture Klagenfurt, went to the German media artist Karen Irmer. Due to Corona, the 5-month working stay in the painter’s studio of the city of Klagenfurt took place only this year.
“My works have no identifiable space or place. If you cannot clearly assign and recognize the things you see, what are you looking at? You observe yourself seeing. Seeing itself becomes the object of observation.”

The artist also devoted herself to the play with perception during her stay in Carinthia. The reflection of one’s own viewing continues to be an integral part of her artistic strategy. In the exhibition, a video work in which only the smallest movements take place is juxtaposed with large-format photographic prints. Depending on the incidence of light, these show a different contrast, which further intensifies the inherent mystical quality.

In this way, it is not the individual appearance as such, but the atmospheric situation that becomes the motif. The result is photographs of poetic beauty that, with their implied ambiguity, do not always allow the viewer to clearly determine their location.