Karin Sander 1957-2057

Karin Sander is a well known German artist who lives and works in Berlin, but over the past thirty years she has spent considerable time in Iceland and used the country as a subject in many of her works. This comprehensive exhibition, which is part of the Reykjavík Arts Festival, features pieces spanning the artist’s entire career and offers insight into the work of an international conceptual artist who engages with our environment and existence in unexpected and impactful ways.

Karin is known for revealing new dimensions of reality with minimal intervention. Many of her works rely on the participation of exhibition visitors or the influence of the surrounding environment, and her subtle interventions into the museum space invite reflection on the place itself—its purpose and its nature. The exhibition Karin Sander 1957–2057 explores notions of site-specificity in geographical, physical, and conceptual terms. Visitors are invited to have themselves scanned and 3D printed as small figurines; blank canvases placed out in the open accumulate surface textures under different conditions and a neon sign positions viewers within Hafnarhús according to Google Earth measurements.

The exhibition features brand new paintings from the series Weathered Paintings—works created by placing untreated canvas in unexpected locations. Over time, the canvases absorb the conditions of their surroundings. Instead of traditional brushwork, these pieces are formed through natural processes of weathering and thus become spontaneous landscape images of the places where they were situated. The works were created across the country and reflect the artist’s interest in the interplay of material, time, and place. The frames have weathered in all regions of Iceland, and during her stay here last summer, Karin travelled around the country, placing canvases in locations including Arnarfjörður, Kerlingarfjöll, and on the north side of Hafnarhús.

Karin Sander’s works often rely on the participation of exhibition visitors and on ideas about the influence of time and place on our self image and appearance. One of the exhibition’s most extensive pieces is Visitors 1:8. It is technically complex and develops over the course of the exhibition through the participation of guests. Three dimensional prints of scanned visitors form an impressive sculpture as the work comes into being before the audience’s eyes.

Karin Sander received her art education in Düsseldorf and has, throughout her career, held professorships in fine art at Kunsthochschule Berlin Weißensee and in art history and design at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. She represented Switzerland at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale together with Philip Ursprung. Karin Sander has received numerous international awards, including a research fellowship from the Whitney Museum in New York, the Rome Prize, and the Villa Romana Prize. Her works are included in public and private collections around the world; in this context, both the Reykjavík Art Museum and the National Gallery of Iceland hold works by her. Exhibitions of her work have been presented at renowned institutions worldwide, such as Kunstmuseum Winterthur and SFMOMA. Karin is also the creator of notable public artworks, particularly in Germany and Switzerland, and in 2018 she won the competition for a public art installation in Vogabyggð in Reykjavík.

The exhibition Karin Sander 1957–2057 introduces the artist’s conceptual approach to material and space, and how she surprises us with her innovative treatment of everyday objects, architecture, and digital media.