Artist statement - roaring tigers, hovering lemons and the psychology of climate change
Karin Janssen’s work is fantastical, as blooming with vitality as it is a stagnant reminder of lingering death. Her mixed media paintings and drawings confront us with the skulls of extinct dinosaurs towering over watercolour tapestries of wild and tropical plants, of hopeful dolphins and guilty hands, of birds and bees and backbones entwined and cast back against the unforgiving lines of urban skyscrapers.
Janssen is a Dutch artist who has lived and worked in various countries around the world. Inspired by the complex realities she finds in each place, her gift is in her ability to construct ethereal figures out of forms and colours that are dark and disturbing, yet devastatingly beautiful. Her process is deeply instinctive. Figures flow and battle across the vast expanse of large-scale pieces. Using luxurious watercolours, inks and elaborate gouaches, they are both abstract and metaphorical.
Her latest body of work “Escape to Solastalgia” is rooted in Janssen's interest in environmental psychology, and explores the troubling dichotomy of finding both comfort and suffering in the future of our ecosystems. Janssen’s use of motifs such as coral reefs, exotic animals, and the creative form of the female figure, thread her pieces together with the world’s stories. They are both deeply-coded analogies for personal trauma and the universally-recognisable myths, theories, and legends that make up our collective histories. Her transitional pieces consistently convey our ongoing struggle to maintain a collaborative symbiosis with the world.
Janssen transports us out of the world of the real, the literal and the brutal, and into the unearthly worlds of her creations – giving us a surreal and cruel mirror into the distorted realities of our own. By embedding individual stories into the communal narrative of the world’s demise, in its mania, perhaps Janssen’s figures begin to hint at a need to shed the burden of personal guilt, which so frequently clouds our ability to be proactive. Instead, that burden is replaced with a clarity of thought which will enable us to act. Janssen arms us with a collective responsibility for the environment’s destiny.
Janssen uses natural elements to convey her personal struggles and contradictions. She employs coincidental techniques such as decalcomania or allowing paint to spread in large puddles over paper, which creates natural marks for her to interact with and manipulate.
In Janssen's paintings and drawings, interwoven with paper cuts and collages, recurring motifs of the roaring mouth, creeping plant forms and dynamic birds and animals represent change. Her bold and vibrant works interrogate our animalistic nature and explore the body as a site for narrative. Janssen’s work forces us to flee, to escape into our responsibility, not just to ourselves and our own emotional turmoil, but to the fate of a world of which we too are inextricably a part.
Janssen is a Dutch artist who has lived and worked in various countries around the world. Inspired by the complex realities she finds in each place, her gift is in her ability to construct ethereal figures out of forms and colours that are dark and disturbing, yet devastatingly beautiful. Her process is deeply instinctive. Figures flow and battle across the vast expanse of large-scale pieces. Using luxurious watercolours, inks and elaborate gouaches, they are both abstract and metaphorical.
Her latest body of work “Escape to Solastalgia” is rooted in Janssen's interest in environmental psychology, and explores the troubling dichotomy of finding both comfort and suffering in the future of our ecosystems. Janssen’s use of motifs such as coral reefs, exotic animals, and the creative form of the female figure, thread her pieces together with the world’s stories. They are both deeply-coded analogies for personal trauma and the universally-recognisable myths, theories, and legends that make up our collective histories. Her transitional pieces consistently convey our ongoing struggle to maintain a collaborative symbiosis with the world.
Janssen transports us out of the world of the real, the literal and the brutal, and into the unearthly worlds of her creations – giving us a surreal and cruel mirror into the distorted realities of our own. By embedding individual stories into the communal narrative of the world’s demise, in its mania, perhaps Janssen’s figures begin to hint at a need to shed the burden of personal guilt, which so frequently clouds our ability to be proactive. Instead, that burden is replaced with a clarity of thought which will enable us to act. Janssen arms us with a collective responsibility for the environment’s destiny.
Janssen uses natural elements to convey her personal struggles and contradictions. She employs coincidental techniques such as decalcomania or allowing paint to spread in large puddles over paper, which creates natural marks for her to interact with and manipulate.
In Janssen's paintings and drawings, interwoven with paper cuts and collages, recurring motifs of the roaring mouth, creeping plant forms and dynamic birds and animals represent change. Her bold and vibrant works interrogate our animalistic nature and explore the body as a site for narrative. Janssen’s work forces us to flee, to escape into our responsibility, not just to ourselves and our own emotional turmoil, but to the fate of a world of which we too are inextricably a part.
BiographyKarin Janssen has her studio in Taipei, Taiwan, where she had two solo exhibitions. She has exhibited in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, Brazil, Greece and Switzerland.
After her studies at AKV St Joost in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, Janssen set up various art projects in Ecuador, Peru, and Paraguay. She went on to undertake an Artist in Residency in Casa das Caldeiras in São Paulo, before returning to Amsterdam. There she founded NIKA Art Projects, whose project Drawing her Story used art to cultivate mutual understanding between immigrant and Dutch women, and has reached 50,000 people in the Netherlands.. In 2011 Janssen opened Karin Janssen Project Space in London, which she ran until 2015, when she relocated to Shanghai to work full time in her studio. In 2018 she moved to Taipei in Taiwan. Her work has attracted much international press attention, amongst others featuring on the cover of the East End Review in London and on national television in Taiwan and is part of various private collections in the Netherlands, the UK, Brazil and Asia. |
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