The upcoming artist Katharina Stangler (born 1982) graduated from the Düsseldorf Art Academy in 2018 under Prof. Andreas Schulze and has been working in Düsseldorf ever since. Currently, the artist is transforming an old farm in the countryside into a home and studio.
Towards the end of her studies, Katharina Stangler developed a painting technique in which the color pigments, applied in gestural and loose movements, can move freely on and in the water-soaked cotton fabric of her canvases. The artist mostly uses indigo pigment, which after application moves through the pictorial space together with the water in the fabric – sometimes in broad, waterfall-like cascades, sometimes as fine ramifications where the pigment blooms out into the fabric.
In her editions, the depth of the color space is transferred through the use of a textured paper. Here, too, the aforementioned color gradients and reactions appear on the background of the painting, inviting a detailed examination of each work. While the small formats such as »Indian« and »A Boy’s Face« appear – albeit highly stylized – like portraits and thus enter into a direct dialogue with the viewers, the encounter with the large-format work »Hand« is of a more performative nature: with her gaze, the person on the right initially fixes the viewers from a distance, after which their eyes, following the color, glide down the two bodies to the lower edge of the picture in a flow that becomes increasingly abstract. Seen from close up, small color nuances of cyan and purple can be discovered, while the individual, figurative elements continue to blur into a color space.
