For more than a decade, Katrin Fridriks has been experimenting with the constitutive elements of painting, that is the quality of the paint, its support, as well as a range of unconventional painting techniques, to attain her distinct and outstanding style. It is the unique interplay between the medium, the timing and the artists’ body moving around a canvas on the floor that encompasses the fluid and organic quality of her paintings. Although the artist is best known for large-scale paintings, her truly contemporary artistic practice originates in an early engagement with Performance Art (“Dust of Galaxy”, 2002) and Land Art (“Energy Flow”, 2004), but also her studies of Japanese calligraphy, which were the starting point for her long-term research of the medium painting. Learning the technique of executing a letter in one brush stroke only (as opposed to built-up lettering in Latin script), but most notably her experience of working in real space and time, all influenced what today has become a choreographical painting process. The most prominent predecessor of working on a canvas placed directly on the floor to apply paint by physically moving around it, is the American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock. Ensuing from this seminal practice, Fridriks has developed her genuinely own technique: By transferring the movement and speed of her gestures into the paint, she achieves to capture the very act of painting, and thereby turns the picture itself into an event. This sensation of witnessing the painting as happening before one’s eyes, rather than viewing a conventional self-contained image, is essential for the engaging experiences that Fridriks provides the beholder with. Before consciously contemplating the artwork, the viewer is already involved sensuously.
