Katrin Korfmann
"Ensembles Assembled"

Exhibition: 25 October - 21 November 2015
Opening: Sunday, 25 October, 4pm
in collaboration with ART AFFAIRS

Artist Katrin Korfmann’s photographic works capture people’s movements with a bird’s-eye view; the grid of everyday life binding its dynamics. Rather than showing a sum of independent persons moving, Korfmann’s new work records people merging into one being. In various places on earth collective rituals are photographed: events sustained by individual euphoria in which colour – or colourful garment – dissolves individuality. The highly aesthetic project reports of social realism and euphoric utopianism, acting in between the global event catalyzing a visual surrender and the glocal play catalyzing deeper contextual literacy.

Owing to her background in photography, Katrin Korfmann’s work in various media – photo works, videos and installations – is concerned with concepts of framing, perspective, and the social dimensions of perception, such as the relationship between the observer and the observed. An important determinant in her work is time, made visible through the presentation of different sequential incidents that have been registered within a given period and location, in one single spatial arrangement. The issue of responsibility for the existence of an image, the choice of the right moment and the framing that determines an image also play an important role in her work. Korfmann’s work may be characterized by a formal level of composition, structure and spatiotemporal experience, that is aimed at the registration and investigation of social constructions and behavior in public space.

Katrin Korfmann grew up in Berlin, Germany and lives and works in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. She studied at the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, where she specialized in photography and continued her research with residencies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Cittadellarte in Biella, Italy and the Chinese European Art Centre in Xiamen, China. She won several prizes for her work, including the Radostar Prize (CH), Prix de Rome (2nd prize) and the Esther Kroon Award (NL), and she received grants from international institutions like the Robert Bosch Foundation, Foundation Würth the Akademie der Künste Berlin (DE), and the Mondriaan Fund (NL).

Since the late 1990s her work has been exhibited internationally in galleries, museums, alternative art institutions and public spaces. Her work is represented in numerous private and public international collections such as ING Art Collection (NL), Photomuseum The Hague (NL), Aegon Art Collection (NL), Artium (E), Carla & Hugo Brown Collection (NL), Ekard Collection and Christena & William Gautreaux Collection (US).

Publication
The original large-scale photo-prints of "Ensembles Assembled" are processed via horizontal continuations throughout the book, extending across multiple Japanese folded pages to enable close examination of details and still represent the full scale. Each work is anthropologically and phenomenologically introduced as a contemporary event. Inspired by the works, critic and curator Gregory Volk connects references at play while Onomatopee director Freek Lomme speculates about the relations within the playing field. Published by Onomatopee, NL: Softcover, Japanese Binding, 116 pages, Full colour, 17,5 x 24 cm (7 x 9,5 inch), ISBN:978-94-91677-19-9. Texts by Gregory Volk, Freek Lomme and Nanne op t’Ende, Graphic design: Studio Adriaan Mellegers.