Karin Sander

born 1957 in Bensberg, Germany

lives and works in Berlin, Germany

She studied at the Freie Kunstschule (Free Art School) and the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (State Academy of Art) in Stuttgart from 1979 to 1987.

Karin Sander has been a guest professor at several schools, including the Akademie der bildenden Künste (Academy of Fine Arts) in Karlsruhe, the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Stuttgart, and CalArts (California Institute of the Arts) in Los Angeles. From 1999 to 2007 she hold a professorship at the Kunsthochschule (School of Art) in Berlin-Weissensee and from 2007 to 2023, she was professor for architecture and art at the ETH Zurich, where she initiated the research group 3D Modelling / 3D Printing and Hybrid Reality, also serving as the group’s head. She has received numerous awards and is both a member and currently director of the Visual Arts Section at the Academy of Arts in Berlin.

Together with Philip Ursprung, an architectural- and art historian, Karin Sander is currently representing Switzerland at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. Their project “Neighbours” can be viewed in the Swiss Pavilion.

The artist is known for her pointedly conceptual works, like drawings with applied office materials, polished chicken’s eggs (Hühnereier), polished wall pieces, Patina Paintings, Mailed Paintings, figurative sculptures of living persons on a scale of 1:5, 1:7,7 or 1:10, Kitchen Pieces and others. She alters the state of things that are already there, be they objects or rooms. In small interventions into the situation, she exposes its material conditions to establish a minimal difference between everyday life and art.

“The artist Karin Sander is fundamentally interested in the poetry of latency inherent in existing objects. Revealing what things might be, or could become, is a genuinely artistic strategy for investigating and working with situations, spaces, and objects that defines a key modus operandi in her works. She always carves another aspect that has usually been overlooked out of existing reality. In other words, she confronts common notions of what is reality with an alternative reality.” (Harald Welzer)

Selected solo exhibitions: Kunsthalle Tübingen (2021); Museion, Bolzano (2020); Haus am Waldsee in Berlin (2019); Kunst Museum Winterthur (2018); Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg (2013); Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe (2012); n.b.k., Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin (2011); K20 Kunstsammlung NRW, Düsseldorf (2010); Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (2010); Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela (2003); Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, (2002); The Museum of Modern Art, New York City (1994); Städtisches Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach (1992).

Selected museum collections: Museum of Modern Art, New York City; Metropolitain Museum, New York City; Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; National Museum of Art, Osaka; Wilhelm Lehmbruck Museum, Duisburg; Sprengel-Museum, Hanover; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; Lenbachhaus, Munich; Listasafn Ísland - National Gallery of Iceland, Reykjavík; Kunst Museum Winterthur; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Dusseldorf; Museion Bozen, Bolzano; Kansallisgalleria – Finnish National Gallery, Helsinki; Muzeum Artystów, Łódź.