Lucas Gehrmann
Karin Pliem’s exhibition “Biocultural Community” on tour through China
Just as the Chinese dragon glides through the air and waters as a ‘hybridʼ of many animals and forms of beings, sometimes spitting clouds of fire and sometimes spreading fertility and happiness, the protagonists in Karin Pliem’s painted ‘cosmologiesʼ1 are as diverse and contrasting: blossoms, fruits, living beings from different regions of the world and […]
Belinda Grace Gardner. Enigmas of Existence
Karin Pliem’s floral cosmologies draw the gaze into unfathomable depths. The eye traverses a seemingly endless, intertwined, opulent terrain of blossoms and umbels, herbaceous grasses, fruits and vines, mycelia and mosses. Behind bursting leaves, flowers, tendrils, and ferns, further plants spring forth, between which the delicate contours of artefacts, African figurines, and masks, the outlines […]
Lucas Gehrmann Natura morta vivente – con bravura or misteriosa, sometimes even: con calamari. Karin Pliem‘s Symbiotic Unions as holobiontic still lifes
Karin Pliem‘s Symbiotic Unions as holobiontic still lifes.* The still life today is hardly ever still. Over almost four centuries, as the carefully composed natura morta – tranquillo e pensieroso –, the genre had reminded us of the transience of life, of things, of all our aspirations. Then the images started to move, and henceforth – accelerando […]
Ludwig Seyfarth, „A World Society of Flowers“
At first, what we see depicted in Karin Pliem’s paintings are forms of vegetation ― primarily floral ones. Without botanical knowledge, however, we can only guess that we are looking at plants from various, very diverse regions and ecosystems around the globe that have been brought together in one image. We are familiar with art-historical […]
Margit Zuckriegl, „Beauty in Nature and Art“
The discovery of nature as a topos of artistic expression in the 19th century was always linked to the idea that anything “natural” was inherently “beautiful.” Nature cannot produce anything, be it vegetation, crystal formations or mirages. Citations drawn from the vocabulary of natural beauty were implemented in art with the aim of legitimizing the […]
Vanessa Joan Mueller, Extract from: Booklet , Kunsthalle Wien (publisher),
Vienna 2015, p. 26
Karin Pliem Nature and culture are productive opposites. While the former represents the original, the unspoiled, the latter is considered its transformation, if not its transcendence. The relationship between nature and culture is not however one of antagonism, instead they are virtually dependent on one another. Art likes to play them against one another, although […]
Lucas Gehrmann
Karin Pliem: Convolutions (2014)
Karin Pliem shows us a nature that doesn’t exist inherently: on canvas diversified creatures from different ecological systems and various parts of the world meet. She shows plants from tropic rainforests and valleys in the Alps in bloom and withering combined with transgenic plants, sea- and fresh-water animals. Through the painting process Karin Pliem creates […]