Kunst Museum Winterthur

At second glance, what could be dismissed as gimmicks, actually opens up new worlds. Karin Sander's work breaks with the conventions of exhibition operations and questions artistic traditions and social conventions. At Kunst Mueum Winterthur, the internationally sought-after artist presents an extensive exhibition of her oeuvre.

The obligatory cover picture for the exhibition flyer is missing. The white area with the black signature turns into a picture without a picture. At first this irritates, but illustrates the artist's strategies. The artist, who was born in 1957 in Bensberg (North Rhine-Westphalia) and now lives in Berlin and Zurich, uses such shifts to question the traditions of the art business - on the exhibition poster as well as in the exhibition at Kunst Museum Winterthur. The questioning of traditional methods manifested itself in her interventions, which she realized in the past at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart or the National Museum of Art in Osaka, among others.

Karin Sander's oeuvre is difficult to assign to any classical genres. The artistic implementation of her works is much too varied. Consistently and cunningly, she checks the media used, the status of the work, the artistic authorship, or any subsequent changes in its use.

Despite her conceptual rigour, her work appears both light and playful. Karin Sander emerged in the 1990s with so-called wall pieces: wall surfaces polished to a mirror-smooth gloss, with which the artist redefined the idea of wall painting. The reversal of traditional methods also manifests itself in Mailed Paintings: white-primed canvases in standard formats that are sent unpackaged to the respective exhibition venues, travel through the globalized art scene and record the traces of their transports. She moreover redefined the possibilities of figurative sculpture as early as the late 1990s: in 3-D Bodyscans lebender Personen [3D Body Scans of Living People], people are scanned and the data subsequently printed using a 3D printer in the formats 1 : 10 or 1 : 5:, an almost automated process developed in 1997 specifically for this project according to the data provided by the artist.

At Kunst Museum Winterthur, Karin Sander is the first artist to show her work not only in the museum extension but also in the collections in both buildings as well as in virtual space.

Curators: Konrad Bitterli, Simona Ciuccio