Anomalies Abound in the Art of Katrin Alvarez-Schlüter
2004 // Gallery & Studio
An accomplished writer as well as a painter, Katrin Alvarez has exhibited widely throughout Germany, Switzerland and Israel, She revealed herself to be a dazzling conjurer of intriguing neo-surreal visions in her recent. New York exhibition in the Chelsea venue of Angora Gallery at 530 West 25th Street.
Such is Alvarez-Schlüter´s technical facility that she can render her most far-fetched visions remarkably convincing on her oils, mixed media works, and Conte drawings, in which a varied cast of characters enacts pictorial dramas that appear to allude to a wide range of social and poetically personal themes.
One of this artist´s most interesting devices is to combine figures of greatly differing sizes in the same composition, the disparties of scale suggesting that they actually inhabit different worlds yet are meeting on some unearthly plane with his own symbolic logic. Anomalies abount in her compositions, which startle us in a manner akin to that other collector of figurative oddities and ironies, the late Gregory Gillespic.
Alvarez-Schlüter, however, hat her own unique imaginative realm, in which it is possible to encounter a languorous beauty in a chic mini-dress and knee-boots inhabiting what appears to be a daydream in the company of tiny human and animal figures hat may or may not be figments of her imagination.
Reality and fantasy are obviously both up for grabs in Alvarez-Schlüter´s contemporary allegories, where the figures are often seen in dreamlike enviroments, evoked in minute detail with a flawless realist technique. These often take the form of room interiors where odd vegetation appears to be growing out of cracks in the walls and objects can be seen that are not readily recognizable yet are depicted to skillfully that we feel they must serve some mysterious purpose.
In one particularly disconcerting picture, its complex composition beautifully delincated in Conte, sinuous vines issue from a large car-shaped form affixed to the wall, encircling the had of a seated figure and culminating in a small tree that sprouts form the top of his head. Such images seem to spring directly form the artist´s subconscious and something about the juxtaposition of figure, enviroment, and objects strikes an emotional chord on a viewer. While some compositions are intricate and detailed, other have a slightly more abstract quality, with stylized figures distorted in an expressive manner for psychological impact. Burnished colors aestheric appeal of the latter compositions.
But it is Alvarez-Schlüter´s ability to induce us to suspend disbelief that makes her paintings especially remarkable. For example, a human figure will have the head of a bird or some other anatomical anomaly will be depicted so convincingly that the viewer will accept it as thought it were completely natural. We take her imagery at face value because she presents it with utter verisimilitude, with a stylistic consistency that makes it totallybelievalble in context.
One could cite Hieronymus Bosch and certain of the Surrealists a stylistic anteccedents of Katrin Alvarez-Schlüter. However, her works seems to spring not from art historical sources, but from her direct observations of the human condition which she transposes into visual symbols that ae as psychologically perceptive as they are visually engaging.
Maureen Flynn, Gallery&Studio Vol.10, No.5, Page 21