Katrin Plavčak: SUMMEN PURZELN HUMMING TUMBLING

Political painting in the post-factual age

While postmodernist painting has always been accompanied by discussions about its end, it always refers to its most important characteristic: that thanks to its discursive character, it can span a never-ending network of representations. Thirty-five years ago, the painter Thomas Lawson came up with the apt expression "Last Exit: Painting". The same applies to the works of Katrin Plavčak (born 1970 in Gütersloh, grew up in Austria). Her non-paste oil and acrylic paintings evoke figurative references to Dix and Grosz, Magritte and Picasso, Höch and Lassnig as well as the practice of naïve painting, in which perspective and spatial conditions are suspended and several narrative strands coexist. Katrin Plavčak deals specifically with the history of images that originate from comics, caricature, illustration and, more generally, technical image media. Cliché, distortion, trivialisation and spectacle, as produced by the media industry and to whose logic art and its institutions are naturally also susceptible, form an aesthetic fundus for her, from which she formulates her artistic and socio-political view of things with her own painterly language in a highly skilful transformation process. Katrin Plavčak requires neither pathos nor an ideologically "correct" position; rather, she directly follows her interest in Dada or Surrealism, art movements in which the achievements of photography, film and advertising, and thus not least popular magazine culture in methodical interweaving with montage and collage, have co-determined the avant-garde concept. In addition, Katrin Plavčak is a great portraitist who knows how to get to the heart of the psychological characteristics of her found or invented figures with great painterly skill. So if the post-factual age is being proclaimed these days because "we are drowning in information to the point where it becomes meaningless to us", as Lawson put it in 1981, then the antithesis could be art that is prepared to explore explicitly political and mythical dimensions. Critical, resistant distance arises in this medium as if by itself, when space is created on the canvas for complex issues, ideas and feelings in a highly condensed form.