Artist Statement

Katarina Countiss

Katarina Countiss (Honolulu, United States) makes paintings and drawings. By exploring the concept of landscape in a nostalgic way, Countiss creates intense personal moments masterfully created by means of rules and omissions, acceptance and refusal, luring the viewer round and round in circles.

Her paintings establish a link between the landscape’s reality and that imagined by its conceiver. These works focus on concrete questions that determine our existence. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language, she investigates the dynamics of landscape, including the manipulation of its effects and the limits of spectacle based on our assumptions of what landscape means to us. Rather than presenting a factual reality, an illusion is fabricated to conjure the realms of our imagination.

Her works appear as dreamlike images in which fiction and reality meet, well-known tropes merge, meanings shift, past and present fuse. Time and memory always play a key role. By applying abstraction, she wants to amplify the astonishment of the spectator by creating compositions or settings that generate tranquil poetic images that leave traces and balances on the edge of recognition and alienation.

Her works doesn’t reference recognisable form. The results are deconstructed to the extent that meaning is shifted and possible interpretation becomes multifaceted. Katarina Countiss currently lives and works in San Francisco.~

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Idealism and Concept
marker on paper, 2016
$80

Katarina Countiss
katarinacountiss@gmail.com
katarinacountiss.com
instagram: @katcountiss