Karen Holländer: Last Summer

Karen Holländer: "In my upcoming exhibition, I am showing works that were created over the course of last summer.
They are mainly still lifes, a pictorial theme that has always occupied me.
My focus is on the depiction of everyday objects, which can also be seen as metaphors for certain circumstances of human existence.
A self-portrait in the form of a circle, which turns clockwise around itself in a dancing pose, stretching its maximum radius, until it threatens to lose the ground beneath it.
The twisting around -itself- continues in a series of colourful rubber rings that, freshly wound from the finger, produce infinite variations of knotted states of tension, only until they dissolve by themselves and find their way back to their original ring shape.
The phenomenon of "entanglement" has been taken up again and again by me as a pictorial component, as in the picture "Liaison", a flower still life of a somewhat different kind.
Two long-stemmed daisies, grown out of a rather tangled, labyrinthine situation, display a fragile but unsurpassable poise and grace.
Once alert to a particular phenomenon, I become a notorious collector.
In the course of the last summer, on my walks through the city, I have made friends not only with the ubiquitous bird species sparrow, but also with all those plants commonly referred to as "weeds", whose growth involuntarily establishes itself in wall cracks, on kerbs or between floor slabs, i.e. in the most impossible and shabby locations, in order to stubbornly and impressively unfold their green-leaved beauty there, crowned by one or more long-stemmed flowers.
Just as walls are currently used as carriers of various messages, I too occasionally feel compelled to symbolically add a protective greenhouse made of chalk to my special plant friends, knowing full well that it would be washed away by the next rain and unable to do anything against the given circumstances anyway."