about my work
'The really modern, i.e. conscious artist, has a two-fold vocation. In the first place to create the purely visual work of art; in the second place to make the public susceptible to the beauty of pure visual art'
Theo van Doesburg1
Since 2006, Katrin Keller (* Dortmund, 1974) has been creating series of pictures which might best be termed and circumscribed in a dual sense as NEO-Concrete Art. – Keller’s non-figurative and non-relational compositions fit on the one hand in the long line of abstraction in modern art, historical as it has since become, while on the other, she combines in these pictures the ‘non-colours’ of black, white and grey and luminous Day-Glo colours, that is, out of a contemporary dazzling palette generated in turn out of the contemporary realm of neon colours. The outcome is a quite extraordinary Neo Geo.
Since the 1920s, geometric abstract art has been pursuing within the Concrete Art established by Theo van Doesburg an exclusively anti-figurative, non-objective and autonomous kind of painting. Rather than a subjective, emotive, spiritually and mystically charged vocabulary of form, as free as it was determined by chance and the process of painting, such as we find, say, in the early abstract compositions of a Wassily Kandinsky, this development has approached picture-making as an utterly rational, objectively controlled, methodical and frequently also analytical, mathematical-geometric process. Colours and the formative means of geometry, namely figures, volumes and lines, are not employed as derivative abstract ciphers and signs by which to reproduce in visual terms a certain response to nature or an interpretation of reality; here they represent objective, concrete means with which to create and construct pictures by a conceptual procedure, works rationally planned from start to finish. This concrete-constructivist art, shaped according to a given, rational logic, operates on the premise of being the artistic representation of purely visual, optical structures, not the expression of subjectively individual sensations or stirrings. Yet it possesses optical effects that fracture and run startlingly athwart that analytical logic.
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