Tamara K.E. – Ink Under The Skin

About

Aurel Scheibler is delighted to be showing a solo show of new works by Georgia-born German artist Tamara K.E. under the title of Ink Under the Skin. Ink Under the Skin is K.E.’s first solo exhibition in Berlin. At the same time, her output from the years 2001 and 2003 are included in the show 31: Women at Haus Huth, Sammlung Daimler, Berlin, from Feb. 29 onwards.

Ink Under the Skin comprises two monumental pieces on filmscreen that are no less than ten and four meters in size as well as miniature-like drawings produced with a Copic Marker pen and covering the entire breadth of the world of images Tamara has created. The display is rounded out by two freestanding filmscreen works, neon tubes scattered around the space as well as a lightbox.

In her works, Tamara K.E. combines the classical medium of painting with a Photoshopped world of images that she then prints out with analogue methods. In terms of both pictorial idiom and creative process, there is no clear separation of analog and digital. The pieces reflect our cultural memories, newer or already wide-spread socio-political themes, and address the progressive transition into a digital world. 

K.E.’s work starts with Copic Marker pen, pencil and watercolor drawings. She then scans them, digitizes them and in the process dissects them into the individual pictorial motifs. Invented comic figures, stencil-like figures and isolated objects are embedded in a multi-layered, digitally created weave of images. They meld with an amorphous digital masse in which their origins become far less important and with it the idea of authenticity.

The image generated onscreen is then printed on filmscreen. The thin, transparent material resembles a membrane, on which the momentary state of the constantly moving, heterogeneous, opaque continuums is visible. Out of this pictorial world, individual themes emerge, like traces and shadows of randomly occurring memories, fields of energy or emotions. They do not jell into rigid settings, and instead an image that is just evolving may just as easily dissolve again immediately into individual particles, that eventually then reform to create another image.

Among other things, the titles of the pieces point to this: The Big Twilight Boom II, the large-format, six-part work which presents the moment of this dissolution, the maximum concentration and the state of transition into an unknown future. The idea of constant transformation is innate to the free, random interplay of the pictorial elements.

Tamara K.E. emerged in the context of the Düsseldorf art world back in the early Nineties. She studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts and at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, where she graduated in 2004. Since 2010 Tamara has lived in Brooklyn / New York and Düsseldorf. The artist is known for both her radical, socio-critical, conceptual paintings and her most recent works, in which she experiments with visual idioms and the opportunities afforded by new technologies.

Tamara K.E. represented Georgia at the 50th Venice Biennial in 2003 and was invited to participate in the 1st Prague Biennial in 2003. She has taken part in exhibitions in renowned institutions world-wide, including Haus Huth, Daimler Contemporary Berlin; Sprengel Museum, Hanover; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Central House of Artists, Moscow; CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam; Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal; and Kunsthalle Hamburg. Her work groups entitled Next Comes Democracy, which she produced in cooperation with Galerie Hans Mayer (Düsseldorf), is on display in Daimler Contemporary collection at Haus Huth, Berlin, as part of the permanent show. Tamara K.E.’s latest shows included 5 minutes of random love at Galerie Beck & Eggeling Contemporary, Düsseldorf, in November 2019.

Tamara K.E. won the Art Prize bestowed by Deutsche Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken (Germany); der UBS Art Award for Young Art (Switzerland), and The European Prize for Painting (Belgium). Alongside her work as an artist, she has held lectures and workshops at Goldsmiths University of London, Kunstakademie Kassel, Berlin University of the Arts, the New York Studio Residency Program, Rutgers University (New Brunswick), the State Academy of the Arts Tbilisi (Georgia), and the Dresden Art Academy.

Tamara K.E.’s works are included in several private and public collections, including the UBS Private Bank Collection and the collections of Deutsche Bank; Daimler Contemporary; the Van Der Heydt Museum; the City of Esslingen Gallery; Museum SAFN Reykjavík; Deutsche Apotheker- und Ärztebank Sammlung; Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg and the Jochen and Susi Holy (Munich); Susanne Porsche (Munich); Edward & Phyllis Kwalwasser (NYC) and Philara (Dusseldorf) collections.