Karina Bisch

"For almost 20 years, I have developed a practice of painting that has gradually opened up to very diverse fields, from performance to monumental sculpture, from painting on silk to installation. Using various bases and developing reuse, assemblages and formal confrontations, I wish to show how the modern project resists in the body and materiality of its own representations. As the result of an intense activity as an iconographer, my work is based on an open practice of the form, quite the opposite of a nostalgic or referential re-reading, enabling the free exercise of the most unexpected visual combinations. The idea is for me to materialise images, literally making them concrete. Started in 1998, mainly through the practice of painting, my work gradually has become more characteristic, more specifically in recent years, with a large variety of means in play.

Fuelled by more and more in-depth research, namely in connexion with the historical avant-garde, my painting work has moved outside of the frame to accompany in practice the confrontation of images and their models, or rather their reactivations. Classification and collage could be seen as the main guiding lines of my work, the drive of this protean activity that merrily defies categories, mediums, styles and genres. I am nevertheless a painter, including when I find myself on stage for example. A direct link connects a patchwork wall hanging to a multi-coloured suit, a set of silk scarves to a monumental décor. Beyond the painted images brought to light, it is this unifying pictorial link that I would like to make visible, through an effort of synthesis.

Painting would be the way to make synthesis possible.

Synthesis would be the way to make painting visible."

KB