Tag: Katharina Arndt

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Art Central 2024

Ting Ting Art Space is making its debut at the prominent Art Central in Central, Hong Kong, a focal event during Hong Kong Art Week. Gathering Asia’s emerging galleries and internationally renowned masters, the exhibition will feature seven artists spanning from playful and bold prints to street art graffiti, from abstract symbols to serene landscapes that offer solace to the soul. Additionally, alongside the paintings, large-scale sculptures will also be showcased.

Sculpture work – “Ashes of History,” created by Spanish artist Alejandro Monge, uses destruction as a new form of creation for reflection. The artwork to be exhibited at Art Central is a realistic series of burnt dollar bills. Monge recreates stacks of bills using paper and acrylic paint, ultimately burning them to ashes. Through the act of burning his own creations and their imagery, Monge satirically embodies his critique of the all-encompassing rule of today’s societal and economic values. This series of works has garnered widespread international media coverage and attention.

Overall, the curatorial layout and arrangement of artworks designed by Ting Ting Art Space revolve around a circular corridor space. Additionally, the exhibition walls cleverly feature a window-like void, enticing both passersby and visitors to explore the artworks placed around it. Ting Ting Art Space aims to evoke interaction between viewers and artworks, as well as diverse aesthetic experiences from different positions and angles through this experimental design.

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Katharina Arndt POP-UP Exhibition

First Asian Solo Exhibition at Ting Ting Art Space

East German female artist illustrates her thoughts on the absurdity of modern filters and how consumerism fits in our society

Katharina Arndt was born in 1981 East Germany right before the two sides united. Even though from her birth till the unification in 1990, Katharina only experienced about ten years of communist society. This childhood life experience shaped her values and perspective, making her sojourn in Barcelona, Spain quite a culture shock and making her reflect on the different social culture.

For years, Katharina lived between Berlin and Barcelona. The two places are entirely different in national spirit, artistic cycle, and cultural sentiments. All of these factors and perspectives from the past communist East Germany made Katharina’s artistic perception, source of inspiration and her chosen media each possess their unique meaning and depth.

She grew up in a system and environment that did not have the concept of consumerism and a consumerist system but only consisted of people’s communes; years later, when Katharina was freely enjoying the Western consumerist products, such as beaches, sunshine, shopping etc., she could not help but start to reflect on this crossover of her social experiences from two opposite societies. She then took a step further and discussed the shallowness of human nature, and the behaviors and living attitude limited by all sorts of restrictions created by social media.

Showering under sunlight in Barcelona, lazily drinking iced alcohol or beverages on the beach, smoking from time to time… people are always taking pictures: of the sky, of the light, of the beach, of the food and alcohol, of themselves or each other… nonstop. After taking the pictures, people add on filters to embellish. Yet this heavenly sight, a series of filtered and perfect behavior and photos, yet when we put down our phones and look around, it is then when we discover the beaches covered in all kinds of leftovers, cigarette butts, and trash created by our behaviors.

Katharina ARNDT, Barceloneta Beach, 450 x 190 cm, acrylic on canvas, 2023

Katharina consciously chose to use a more childlike brush stroke, meant to remain a distance from the real world; therefore presenting things as they genuinely are.

Lines seemingly simple and rough are actually well thought out and designed. Katharina’s personalized artistic interpretation abandons complicated figurative description and depicts the objects through focused and conceptual strokes.

Katharina uses lots of manmade materials (e.g. PVC film, painted paper and fiberglass), glossy acrylic and paint marker as her creative medium, meant to use the smooth texture and visualization to mock our world now that is filled with plastic and over-materialized.

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Katharina Arndt

Katherine

Katharina Arndt is a contemporary artist from Germany who lives and works between Berlin and Barcelona. She studied Fine Arts at Braunschweig school of art and later on obtained her Master of Fine Arts by John Armleder. 

She does this through artificial mediums such as PVC film, lacquer paper and Plexiglas with glossy acrylic paint and lacquer markers, using glossy texture to represent our plastic and materialistic culture. The focus of Arndt’s practice is the observation of digital communication and the portrayal of mass consumption in the digital age. Her cartoon figures are a reflection on how we express ourselves in the digital arena and how we are becoming ever obsessed with the digital world whilst losing ourselves in the physical.  Fast, reduced, almost childlike, motifs and medium  ironize the contemporary mass consumerist aesthetic of a decadent, abundant society in picturing her everyday life.

Many paintings with beach references, sunburns, and even Spanish brands of drinks like beer cans or juices can see the influence of Barclona on Arndt.  She also thinks clothes and accessories give a perfect impression of the spirit of the age we are living in. The stark contrast between reality and fantasy in her artworks reflect the artist’s livelihood in her young age in the East side of Germany, back when there wasn’t any food in supermarkets. She is deeply perplexed by the absurdity of our modern day-to-day activities and behaviors, and adopts a seemingly childish way of painting as an attempt to step back and look at things as they genuinely are.