Katja Farin draws people spontaneously. Her compositions begin as rough drawings that she collages together and draws over, often many times, gradually working up to finished pieces. “I see my works as vignettes of an abstract, ongoing performance, revealing a set of experiences through composition, gesture, an attempt at humour - even though no one thinks they’re funny - expression, stages, façades,” the artist says: “a screenshot of the millennial’s current moment.”
Her figures are left rather ambiguous. Genders, races, ages and faces are hard to make out. Farin’s world is rendered in a muted palette made up of subtle tonal shifts, blurred outlines and fluid forms. There’s no bright Southern Californian sunlight or HD clarity here - rather everybody looks quite magical and unreal.
“Ambiguity, or perhaps anonymity,” Farin says, “is meant not only to allow viewers a way to see themselves within the figures, but also to be an expression of contemporary interactions: those that are distant, voyeuristic and fuelled by anxiety surrounding social media. Many of them are based on the people around me, but I rarely render them recognisable. I’d like to think that I inject the figures with anxiety, loss, relationship, care, void, purgatory and precarity.”
View Katja Farin's artist bio