Katrin Plavčak

Katrin Plavčak (1970) is an Austrian artist who returned to Vienna in 2017 after living in Berlin for 16 years. She studied painting with Sue Williams and Wolfgang Hollegha at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna and also completed her studies at the Social Academy there. Alongside painting and sculpture, she also engages with music. Since 2000, she has had numerous exhibitions both domestically and internationally, with extended stays and study trips to Mozambique, Sichuan, Chengdu, and New York. She played in the indie rock bands Blendwerk (Vienna) and Erste Stufe Haifisch (Berlin), which released several records. She also collaborates with Ulrika Segerberg in the duo M.O.G. (Mothers of God), where they improvise using sewing machines with contact microphones and loopers. In the winter of 2017, she formed the trio Kinky Muppet.

 

From 2012 to 2014, she was part of the feminist artist group ff, and together with Caro Bittermann and Claudia Zweifel, she created the website thehistoryofpaintingrevisited.weebly.com, which documents women painters throughout history. Since October 2022, she has been a professor of painting and drawing at the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart.

 

 

»As a painter, I look for a reason to pick up the brush. A recurring idea, a strange observation, a dream. Anger may also be a reason to paint, or astonishment and confusion when I reflect on something or try to capture something I believe should not be forgotten. I read a report, a narrative, hear a scientific broadcast on the radio, get caught up in a political or social issue, or try to draw images from my subconscious into my studio. I respond to our world, to my life in this time. The objects, textiles, or installations mostly emerge when I can’t get through with painting, because there are no walls, or because the space where I want to exhibit demands an acoustic adaptation. Sometimes I want to place something in the way of the images or enable them to be used or attacked.

In the studio, I look at my tubes of paint and imagine the colors. Sometimes that’s all I do, just look at the colors and sniff them. I imagine a large blue and a small red opposing it… I read their names… Golden Barok Red, Rose Dore Madder Lake, Cobalt Green Deep, Mars Yellow, Caput Mortum Violet… Worlds unfold… I like the idea that the colors, once out of the tube, become autonomous because you simply can’t put them back in.«

(Katrin Plavčak)