Situative raumzeichnug malerei/site-specific drawing-painting

Huber's project for the Kunstraum addressed the exploration of architectural space within painting and a given environment and how an artist can redefine the potential and roles of architectural drawings.

Huber simultaneously explores drawing as a tool for visual experimentation and speculation with regard to representation of space and investigates the constituents of painting. Historically, as well as in the contemporary context, artists tend to investigate these areas separately, whilst Huber is particularly concerned with a hybrid of these fields.

Combining two different sets of paintings/drawings in an installation for this exhibition, this installation juxtaposed different perspective viewpoints and also reflected on the architectural features/idiosyncrasies of the exhibition place (e.g. a row of neon lights on the ceiling was visually extended with a drawing of anamorphical eyes on MDF). This research ties in with current debates about the representation of space, place and notions of site-specificity. Drawing is used as a method to create new ways of representing space; in the same vein as architects, such as Liebeskind and Tschumi challenge conventions of architectural drawings. Both drawing and painting are used as an experimental method.

Catrin Huber

Biography

Catrin Huber is an artist who regularly exhibits her work nationally and internationally. She has had three solo exhibitions in Germany in the past five years and a catalogue of her work was recently published by ARTWEB24 Kunstraum in Düsseldorf. She works as a visiting lecturer at Wimbledon School of Art in the BA Painting department.

Current Research

Her practice is concerned with an exploration of architectural space - both within painting and with regards to the way in which paintings interact with a given environment. Her work is also a research of the constituents of painting and a practical search for new definitions of what painting can be.

Huber uses architectural elevations, floor plans and maps as inspiration for abstract constructions. She analyses how space is abstracted in architectural drawings and what different methods and materials are used to depict and translate space.

Huber searches for a dialogue with architecture in her work. Consequently the installation and presentation of paintings in a given space is an important aspect of her research, as is the site-specificity of paintings. Here, certain art movements are significant to reflect on, especially artists from the Russian Avant-garde and more recent artists relating to them. In particular she considers El Lissitzky's Proun and Demonstration Rooms to be topical to contemporary art practice.

She also believes the questioning and extending of the paradigms of painting is important. How can artists separate paintings into their constituent parts and reformulate them in space?

For Huber the combination of installation and direction of the viewer with autonomous bodies of work is central to her practice. In composing different series of paintings into homogenous installations, she is creating hybrids of different presentation methods/models.