The artist works under the artist name Oskar Rink. Growing up in her father’s studio, from early onwards she learnt the basic elements of painting. As a fashion designer and illustrator, the Leipzig based artist resigned from following in the footsteps of her father and mentor in order to develop her own language. Oskar Rink’s completed Master Degree at the Sotheby’s Institute of Art / Contemporary Art Department, contributed to the differentiation of her individual perception of art.
“In my work, I reproduce the convoluted process of thinking. Combining notions of confusion and clarity, my practice interrogates the logical incoherence of sense and sensitivity. Emerging from a vague vision, each artwork is constantly growing on multiple dimensions, time and space being of no measure. Part of my process is the imbrication of scattered thoughts as they convene in their cross-connectedness. First they seem randomly placed, but they are all concatenated, following a rhizome structure, where the answer is to be found in the structure itself.
Inspired by Russian constructivism and contemporary architecture, my three-dimensional works are based on aspects of engineering and constructing. Preferably using simple material such as paper, cardboard and thin wooden sticks, I reconstruct manifested dream worlds. The process of building playfully and subversively contemplates the eternal search for a home, a sense of identity. By suggesting that aporia emboldens aspirations, my work reveals the dualism between confusion and clarity, connection and separation, image and self. In a permanent state of oscillation between self and circumstances, constant restlessness drives us to explore the limits of our own making of the world.
My approach to new projects allows room for coincidence and intuition. Each creative process is an on-going development in response to the situation. While I use a variety of materials and processes for each project, my methodology remains consistent. Driven by the context of the efforts, endeavours, impulses, inclinations and undertakings of the ever striving, never resting human mind, my arrangements establish a dream-like surreal quality, inviting the viewer to move into the mellifluous, fragile spheres of inner vision of outer reality.
My work is a reflection of everything I am searching for. The light, the sanity, the urge to dive into the complexity of my surroundings that I am trying to understand, trying to grasp, trying to visualise. My sculptures and paintings contemplate a world, in which I am trying to build a map and draw a path that I can follow; something that guides me, so I won’t get lost.”
Oskar Rink (* 1980 in Leipzig) lives and works in Leipzig.
