7. September - 30. OCtober 2024
“For me, it is always about figuration, not only in my work.”
(Tamara K.E.)
Tamara K.E. has made her mark with radical, socio-critical paintings. In the later works, she frequently combined traditional oil paint with printed, digitally manipulated images, eventually replacing the canvas with transparent filmscreen. The exploration of visual characteristics and the expanded possibilities offered by new technologies allowed her to continuously evolve her unique visual language and the formal conditions of her work.
***
The fascination and allure of Tamara K.E.'s work cannot be easily explained. While she seeks to trigger our cultural memory with her motifs, these are not recycled images but rather random, intuitive discoveries without a specific intention or underlying ideology. Although her work naturally arises from personal observations, ever-changing conclusions, and emotional and psychological tensions, it is not intended to share personal experiences or opinions. Instead, she establishes freely flowing systems of codes, signifiers, and energy fields that guide and direct the gaze toward an “unknown future.” It is about the transition into this unknown future, the process of getting there, which gives us time to reconsider what was and what is. As she herself says, "to give sense to the whole, which in itself is blurry and random."
At the center of the Munich show are K.E.'s latest works—large-scale charcoal drawings on paper from the series Remnants of the Glaring Day, created since 2022, in which she once again reinvents herself in terms of material and technique. This is also demonstrated by the juxtaposition with works from older series, allowing visitors to trace the artist's development over a decade. Selected examples from the series* Farewelling Junkyard*, for which K.E. has been printing digitally generated images onto filmscreen since 2014, also form part of the exhibition. Some of these works belong to the *Revisiting Fear *series, which the artist has been developing since the mid-2010s, using classic canvas and paper as substrates. Twelve small-format paper works from this series, dating from 2014 and 2015, are displayed as a frieze on the upper gallery.
The idea of drawing with charcoal occurred to Tamara K.E. as early as 2006 while she wandered around abandoned coal mines in North Rhine-Westphalia. However, it took 16 years before she found the fitting narrative. It began with small pencil drawings for the series End of the Fringe. The characters depicted—mostly women, girls, and numerous animals—were intended to contrast with the realistic figuration that K.E. frequently employs. Thus, she gave them a touch of protagonists from Japanese manga, comics and anime films, which are also predominantly produced in black and white. To transform these small pencil drawings into strong statements, she finally introduced charcoal, which had been waiting in the wings for so long. K.E. transferred the scenes onto large-format paper using charcoal, giving them an even stranger aura and greater drama, and named the new series Remnants of the Glaring Day.
Tamara K.E. named the Munich show ouch, which sounds the same in both English and German, though in German it is spelled "Autsch." This spontaneous exclamation expresses an immediate emotional or physical sensation. It is an instinctive reaction to pain or sudden discomfort. However, the way it is exclaimed also draws attention away from the event and creates a certain distance from it: no big drama, the thing happened, and the reflex is automatic. Yet it is suggested that the event may be of short impact.
Whether the impression of the exhibition is short-lived or lingers longer is for each visitor to discover.
Uta Grosenick, Berlin