Katinka Lampe paints portraits. In her work you are clearly able to recognise the image of a person. Yet this is not the primary concern of her work. The portrait is merely a mode through which to create a painting: the conception of an image.
Painting is for Katinka Lampe a continual search for a unique autonomous moment. Besides the technical aspect to the medium, painting is about making conscious, subjective and stylistic choices.
The painting it self is therefore a visual statement for Lampe: an image that invites you to come and take a look; to ask questions and to examine what you are looking at.
Katinka Lampe finds inspiration for her work in photos, magazines, newspapers as well as reproductions of old paintings. A print of a Vermeer, a photograph of dolled up model, or a newspaper image of a criminal, are all capable of leading her to stage a scene for a painting.
Each work is part of a series that all have the same subject.
The basic concept underlying her work is that pictorial reality is something autonomous and not a representation of some sort ´objective reality´. At most an image points to our subjective reality, something that we recognise, something we experience as real.
Every painting is a pictorial reality placed in and amongst contemporary visual experiences.
