Katharina Ziemke

Born in 1979 in Kiel, Germany.
Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

Katharina Ziemke's painting contains a world whose beauty is suspended. The subjects in her works seem reified, prisoners of an invasive glaze that is as dazzling as it is demanding, and seems to have sealed the faces and bodies of characters, now become porcelain, against time. Her pictures summon the eye, making it glide over the surface of things, inciting it to venture into this world of silence where lifeless bodies, abandoned on a battle field, may become fragile figurines lost in an enigmatic landscape. Katharina Ziemke's work makes the worst massacres acceptable to the gaze (over the surface), but affects another level of consciousness – that (Freudian) uncanniness that refers the living to the object and gives voice to its imminent end.