Karin Sander
Patina Paintings
You probably know the story of the young New York artist who earned his daily bread as a commercial designer and who one fine day discovered the Brillo boxes he himself had designed displayed as a work of art in Leo Castelli's gallery – raised to that status by Andy Warhol, whose name is today a household work while our unlucky artist-designer remains condemned to everlasting obscurity. Such might well be the fate of those amateur artists who paint their hearts out to produce naive portraits or naturalistic river landscapes on canvases that (for bargain prices and in a range of handy formats) they purchase direct from the manufacturer — only to come across one of those same canvases which, under Karin Sander's direction, has been inscribed with the spatial and temporal marks of its exposure. The first of these paintings were exposed in selected locations by the artist herself: placed in a coal cellar for five days, taken for a three-day voyage on the Baltic, or carried around by the artist for many years on her travels. The canvases have absorbed the patina of their surroundings – like diaries that automatically transcribe the situations in which they find themselves. Karin Sander's only artistic intervention consists in hanging the white canvas in the kitchen or cellar, or below deck on board ship, and in setting the parameters that decide when the picture is finished: after a lapse of time, at the end of a journey, or when the ship is back in port. The picture generates itself autonomously — autopoietically – and together with its title (Seefuchs: Three Days at Sea) presents itself as that projection surface which always, inevitably, constitutes every picture. The paradoxical label Gebrauchs-Bilder (consumer/needed pictures) alludes semantically both to the original purpose for which these canvases were manufactured and to their intended users – who are presented in one of Karin Sander's Patina Paintings with an indispensable opportunity of grasping that art is just the opposite of covering a canvas with paint.
