Karen Kilimnik, who has made a name for herself in the past few years with her unmistakable predilection for wistful excursions into the land of times gone by, is now leaving the white cube and exhibits her works for the first time in a historical setting. For the „Haus zum Kirschgarten“, a dependence of the „Historisches Museum Basel“ depicting 18th and 19th century lifestyle, she has designed some large-scale and some smaller artistic interventions that confront her own notions of history, imbued with subjective yearning and feelings of anxiety, with the context of a museum. The exhibition constitutes a new phase in her oeuvre, oscillating, as always, between fascination and irritation.
The American artist gained first acclaim in the early 1990s as she conjured up, with her installations, drawings, and small-format oil paintings, a world brimming with seemingly trivial desires and longing. The glamour of the fashion world intrigued her just as much as television series or the yellow press. In her early drawings she combined beauties copied from glossy magazines with other people’s quotes as well as her own—sometimes quite caustic—remarks. In her oil paintings, created since the mid-1990s, she has displayed a sense of tradition that has not evolved out of her preoccupation with art of the past but out of the popularized repertoire of the media industry. The peculiar way in which she appropriated, by painterly means, romantic landscapes, castles, horses, and pedigree dogs was just as unusual at the time as her concise installations featuring artificial snow, straw, newspaper clippings, theater props, and impressive patches of fog produced by a machine.
With this lack of detachment, a signature trait of Kilimnik’s art, she continues to break many taboos. With her oeuvre, both regarding its formal aspects and its content, she walks a narrow line. Nevertheless, the consistency with which she has for years pursued her artistic goals is the most compelling argument in favor of an approach that is far more profound than her initial works suggested. While at the beginning her oeuvre was construed as an irreverent as well as trend-setting flirt with the morbidity of the zeitgeist, the exact opposite is now emerging—the utterly non-ironic seriousness with which Kilimnik clings to her motifs.
When she places a fountain made of plaster in the museum garden and has ballet music piped in from a CD player, she designs the museum setting like a Hollywood movie. Not to reveal its fakeness but to make the real situation compatible with her own imaginary world saturated with media imagery. Artificial lightning and roars of thunder turn the bourgeois salon into a scenery whose beguiling beauty sends cold shivers down our spine. The oversized rose made of fabric, the homely enclosure and the hay, and even the lovely oil paintings are theatrically exaggerated. The traces left by Karen Kilimnik in the Historical Museum Basel are marked by the paraphernalia of a thriving entertainment industry. At the same time, they articulate highly authentic experiences, and heart-felt desires both powerful and unfathomable. While the artist evokes up the glamour of a materialistic world, she invests it with a unique, almost animistic aura. Living in a rationalistic world, Kilimnik reclaims the enigmatic.
The wishes and desires that Kilimnki’s historicizing interventions express so pleadingly are firmly anchored in the here and now. Of course they are permeated by rifts. But the borders between frustration and joy, fascination and defense do not run where we expect them to. The truth that Kilimnik attempts to unearth lies hidden somewhere. Her logic is not restricted to the dichotomy of right and wrong, but applies to the lingering ambivalence between dream and reality to which she is committed to exposing herself all her life. In a real historical setting such as the „Haus zum Kirschgarten“ this artistic endeavor shines all the more brightly.
From June 8 another installation by Karen Kilimnik, also staged in a historical environment, will be on display at the Palazzo Tito in Venice.