Katrin PlavčakSUMMEN PURZELN HUMMING TUMBLING

olitical painting in the post-truth age – while the painting of postmodernism has always been accompanied by the debate about its end, it constantly points to its most important quality: that thanks to its discursive character it is able to spin a never-ending web of representations. Thirty-five years ago the painter Thomas Lawson found the apt phrase for this: „Last Exit: Painting“. The same applies to the works of Katrin Plavčak (b. 1970 in Gütersloh, raised in Austria). Her oil and acrylic paintings, executed without impasto, evoke figurative references to Dix and Grosz, Magritte and Picasso, Höch and Lassnig, as well as the practice of naive painting, in which perspectival and spatial conditions are suspended and several narrative strands exist side by side. In doing so, Katrin Plavčak engages deliberately with the history of images derived from comics, caricature, illustration and, quite generally, technical pictorial media. Cliché, distortion, trivialisation and spectacle, as produced by the media industry – to whose logic art and its institutions are of course also susceptible – form for her an aesthetic repertoire from which, in a highly accomplished process of transformation, she formulates her artistic and socio-political view of things in her own painterly language. Katrin Plavčak needs neither pathos nor an ideologically „correct“ position; instead she follows directly her interest in Dada or Surrealism, movements in which the achievements of photography, film and advertising – and thus not least popular magazine culture – helped to determine the avant-garde concept in methodical interlocking with montage and collage. Beyond this, Katrin Plavčak is a superb portraitist who knows how to pin down psychologically, with great painterly skill, the characteristics of her found or invented figures. So if the post-truth age is being proclaimed these days because „we are drowning in information, to the point where it becomes meaningless to us“, as Lawson already put it in 1981, then the counterpole could be an art of this kind, one prepared to sound out explicitly political as well as mythical dimensions. Critical, resistant distance arises in this medium as if of its own accord when, in a highly condensed form, space is created on the canvas for complex circumstances, ideas and feelings.