Karin Voelker

Karin Voelker was born in Germany in 1958. Voelker’s paintings and mixed media works on paper consider the language of the body as a focal point. She no longer works with a model, instead allowing her imagination to define the setting of the canvas. Voelker studied at the College of Fine Art in Berlin. She has exhibited widely in Germany and the United States. As an artist, she varies her technique by using rags in addition to pens, finetipped brushes and wide brushes. This means that, along with contours that delineate or insinuate forms, we also see forms which, through the interplay of light and dark areas, leave fold-like structures on the canvas that seem to create their own pictorial space. This, in conjunction with elements of spraying techniques as well as the bleeding together of colors on the canvas, gives each picture a more varied language of forms. In her works on paper, Voelker has developed her own sketch-like experimental mixed technique, which is frequently based on luminescent stain worked over with sweeping virtuoso pen-and-ink drawings, which in turn are overlapped by coats of oil color. Watercolor like glazing and pasty coats alternate; they are wiped furiously, dabbed, destroyed and rediscovered. Karin Voelker lives and works in Berlin.