Karin Janssen

Karin Janssens paintings and drawings, interwoven with paper cuts and collages, draw on personal memories, cultural myths and ideologies to investigate our subjective and collective experience of the world. Her bold and vibrant works interrogate our animalistic nature and explore the body as a site for narrative. Recurring motifs of the roaring mou... th, creeping plant forms and dynamic birds and animals represent change and transformation, inviting us to reassess our relationship to our internal and external worlds. Disembodied mouths become portals, gateways to another dimension, where fizzing and foaming bubbles, grasping tendrils, sprouting growths, roaring tigers and hovering lemons embody a tumultuous emotional landscape, all charged with a dark and playful wit. Janssens idiosyncratic universe reveals the absurdity of our attempts to occupy or project an idealised image onto ourselves or others. In Extraordinary Machine a purple haired woman rides a wild colourful menagerie of creatures, whilst holding aloft a pale pencil cityscape in one hand and an oversized orb of human cells in the other. Strength and power are simultaneously performed and undermined in Janssens world, with nature, inevitably, always one step ahead. Seductively embracing the grotesque, the overlooked, the unknown and unfathomable, Janssens luscious watercolours and gouaches convey the complications of the human story. Karin Janssen has her studio in Taipei, Taiwan. She has exhibited in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, China, Brazil, Greece and Switzerland. After her studies at AKV St Joost in Den Bosch, the Netherlands, Janssen set up various art projects in Ecuador, Peru, and Paraguay. She went on to undertake an Artist in Residency in Casa das Caldeiras in So Paulo, before returning to Amsterdam. There she founded NIKA Art Projects, whose project Drawing her Story used art to cultivate mutual understanding between immigrant and Dutch women, and has reached 50,000 people in the Netherlands.. In 2011 Janssen opened Karin Janssen ...Read More