Karin Preller presents her sixth solo exhibition, her first at Artspace. Opening on the 6th June at 11h00 this exhibition features twelve evocative photo-based paintings.

The imagery of Preller's recent paintings originates from 8mm home movies filmed in the 1960s. The works are about suburban life in Montgomery Park and Langlaagte, Johannesburg. The artist, as a child, is fleetingly portrayed in some of the paintings, while others include family members and suburban features which are autobiographical yet become emblematic of a certain time and place.

A poignant record of family life and its spaces, film captures the existence of specific moments perhaps more tellingly than photographs do. Yet the outdated quality of film and faded colours accentuate the fleeting nature of memory and the transience of the moment. By selecting, rendering and enlarging stills in oil on canvas, memory is 'made visible', while it's fragmentary nature is enhanced.

Time consuming labour invested in the almost clinical and obsessive process of reproducing these stills in oil paint is an integral part of the work's meaning. Painstaking manipulation of paint on canvas is the very antithesis of fragmentation and elusiveness. Viewed from up close there is nothing but paint - an erasure of detail, an emphasis on stark tonal contrasts and slightly blurred colours. From a distance, the photographic quality asserts itself. The ambiguous surface (at once painterly and photographic), allows the banal to become visible, while simultaneously rendering it strange and slightly sinister.

Writing about Preller's Family Album exhibition, Kathryn Smith (March 2001 in Artthrob) suggested that: "These paintings reveal more about what photography 'leaves out' than if one were to employ photography itself to this same end…there is something uncomfortable about the space that you sense lies beneath the original photograph and Preller's resurrection of its image in a monochromatic painting". The same holds true for Preller's recent work with film stills.

Karin Preller is a Johannesburg based artist. After a relatively brief career in law, she completed a BA (FA) degree at Unisa and an MA (FA) at the University of the Witwatersrand. At present she is a full time artist and works from her studio in Melville. Her work is represented in the collections of Sasol, Absa, Telkom and Standard Bank, amongst others.

The exhibition will be opened by art journalist and critic Johan Myburg on Saturday 6th June 2009 at 11 am at Artspace, Chester Court, 142 Jan Smuts Ave, Rosebank. Please join us for a glass of wine to celebrate this occasion

The show runs until the 27th June 2009.
Artspace is open from 10h00-17h30 Tuesday - Friday, 10h00- 15h30 on Saturdays.
www.artspace-jhb.co.za

For more information and images contact

Taryn Cohn
Media Liaison for Artspace Gallery
083 6715139
taryncohn@artsourcesouthafrica.co.za