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New focus on visual arts: Belgian visual artist Karen Vermeren in Idar-Oberstein

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Artist lecture by Belgian visual artist Karen Vermeren at Campus Idar-Oberstein

The Artist in Residence programme of Trier University of Applied Sciences in Idar-Oberstein is being expanded for artists of the visual arts in cooperation with the Jakob Bengel Foundation, the Gallery Chrom VI and the Pfälzer Hof. The exhibition REIBUNGSWÄRME by Eva-Maria Kollischan was the first exhibition at Villa Bengel to feature exclusively visual art (no jewellery). Kyoko Taniyama showed her work in Chrom VI during Thinking Jewellery XII, Bruce Asbestos also presented his video art in the Pfälzer Hof during the symposium and gave a lecture on it at Campus Idar-Oberstein. The current AiR at Pfälzer Hof Karen Vermeren is now the fourth visual artist who was invited to give the students an inside into her artistic work with a special focus on rock, space and landscape. Her residency is part of Kultursommer Rhineland-Palatinate "Ostwind".

Karen Vermeren has a special interest in the geological development of landscapes, that connects the world of millions or billions of years ago with our time today. In her many artists residencies and travels she keeps on wondering "What can the landscape tell me?" Vermeren is particularly interested in stones, glaciers, volcanos and fold mountains. In many of her works she directly reacts to the exhibition space itself by adding painting to the walls, which connects with architectural elements in the space. Often, she is painting windows as well and thereby she creates an interaction between the room and the landscape: brushstrokes and paint change the view through the window, weather and light change the appearance of the painting. Vermeren explains her interest in windows or frames in the way we as humans look at landscapes: For a 360-degree view would be overwhelming it is easier to observe the landscape through a window or framing grid that defines a certain perspective. She not only works with paint but also mixes pigments of the building material of a space into the paint, she uses tape and thin plastics, often left-over materials, to create texture and depth in her works. 

When before her focus laid on the development of landscapes to how they appear nowadays, in her latest works Vermeren researches the human influence on landscapes and the changes that are and will be caused by that. In her collages "birth stones", a project which started in 2021, she deals with the emptiness that appears inside a rock after mining. Coloured stone shapes reference to colouring gemstones because for our society there are still "not good enogh" yet as they come from the ground.

You can still see "Birth Stones" and other “work in progress” at Pfälzer Hof in Idar-Oberstein until May 12, 2022.

More about Karen Vermeren

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