Karen Kilimnik - Contemporary Art Evening Sale New York Thursday, March 4, 2010 | Phillips

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  • Provenance


    303 Gallery, New York

  • Literature


    K. Kilimnik, Karen Kilimnik Paintings, Zurich/Berlin/New York, 2001, p. 258 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay


    "To me painting is like magic—it’s fun being able to paint a big house, or lots of animals and there they are as if they’re mine now…being so inspired by fairytales, mysteries, books, TV shows and ballets, etc., I like to make up characters myself as if I’m a playwright and these are characters and scenes I invented or observed. […] Probably I also liked the idea of nature and animals either ruling the world or at least still being around noticeably but I also love manicured gardens too…but I always like to make things more beautiful and perfect,"  (K. Kilimnik, Karen Kilimnik Paintings, Zurich, 2001, p. 311).
     
    Karen Kilimnik’s paintings take her viewers deep into her woman-child imagination, touching an all-too-American sense of emptiness. The artist, who made an international name for herself in the early 1990s with seemingly random accumulations of cheap objects and materials that functioned a bit like three-dimensional rebuses, has taken her inspiration in her paintings from the medium’s past—the more romantic and picturesque, the better. Kilimnik’s works evoke a sense of nostalgia for a bucolic past filled with lush scenery, amorous characters and simplistic notions of happiness. Once her paintings are examined more closely, the artist engrosses her viewers with her elaborate collisions of narratives and the poignant sense of longing for contact, beauty and contentment that animate them.

3

Dinnertime Mt. Olympus

2000

Water based oil color on canvas.

8 x 10 in. (20.3 x 25.4 cm).
Signed, titled and dated “Karen Kilimnik Dinnertime Mt. Olympus ‘00” on the reverse.

Estimate
$40,000 - 60,000 

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

4 Mar 2010
New York