Katjia Farin, PPP/ Edwin Oostmeijer Residency Text
October 2022
Painters Painting Paintings
Extract ---
Katja Farin’s painting pictorially explores the feeling of being out of place. While their work is informed directly by their own experiences, touching on queer identity and the politics of self and belonging, it also deals with universal feelings of awkwardness, surliness, and apathy. In a quasi-diaristic manner, Farin transforms these internal emotions into patchwork-esque, vibrantly expressed painting.
Centrally, Farin’s painting deals with discrepancies between the interior and the exterior through contrasting joy and misery in equal measure. Influenced by the despondency of Felice Casorati’s subjects and the emotional content of Marlene Dumas’ work, Farin’s characters (which are always, to some extent, based on themselves) are mostly solitary, and often forlorn. In contrast to their expressions, these ill-at-ease figures are painted with an intensely cheerful palette. With masterful and humorous self deprecation, Farin here communicates a discontinuity between inner world and outer, self and other, individual and community. Farin’s heavy use of patterns is also significant: they liken it to camouflage, granting their subjects the ability to ‘hide in plain sight’ as they absently crouch, sit, think and walk through their vibrant landscapes.
The residency in Amsterdam allowed Katja Farin space and time to develop central themes in their work. Of particular influence was the dutch urban geography, which structures many of Farin’s compositions, such as long stretches of canal, and inner-city detritus which pepper the canvases. The body of work from the residency also continues Farin’s liberal use of perspective in their work. In the manner of Gerard Garouste, Farin’s paintings take on the quality of carnival mirrors: their figures often have awkwardly large, small or long limbs, buildings skew mischievously, horizons stretch infinitely, and clothes dribble beyond their demarcated outlines. Here, the misbehaviour of the painting’s figures serve not only to explore themes of body dysmorphia and how we tessellate within the world, but also to gently probe the fabric of our social reality – along what axis do we differentiate between the real and the fake?
Farin’s work explores categories of chance, luck and manipulation through symbols that reference magic and the occult: levitating playing cards, dice, coins, and mice. In this context, Farin’s use of magical equipment hints at a desire for idealised outcomes, but also presents a darker edge: the potential for cheating, deceit, and manipulation. Describing their work as informed by growing up on the internet and the social landscape of Los Angeles where Farin lives and works, these charged motifs can be read as an anxiety about control and how we relate to the world.
Katja Farin (b. 1996) received a BA in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Farin has gone on to have several solo exhibitions, in and around the US, such as Hum of Virtue, in Lieu Gallery, Los Angeles, 202, Lines From Arguments, Lubov NYC, New York, 2020, and Carry, Carries, Carried, in Lieu Gallery, Los Angeles, 2019. They have also exhibited in several group exhibitions, such as PAPA RAGAZZE! At Nicodim Gallery, and It’s a sad and beautiful world…, at Wilding Cran Gallery, both in Los Angeles in 2020. Farin lives and works in Los Angeles.
In situ
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Untitled,
Felice Casorati
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True Cards, 2022
Katja Farin
Extract ---
Katja Farin’s painting pictorially explores the feeling of being out of place. While their work is informed directly by their own experiences, touching on queer identity and the politics of self and belonging, it also deals with universal feelings of awkwardness, surliness, and apathy. In a quasi-diaristic manner, Farin transforms these internal emotions into patchwork-esque, vibrantly expressed painting.
Centrally, Farin’s painting deals with discrepancies between the interior and the exterior through contrasting joy and misery in equal measure. Influenced by the despondency of Felice Casorati’s subjects and the emotional content of Marlene Dumas’ work, Farin’s characters (which are always, to some extent, based on themselves) are mostly solitary, and often forlorn. In contrast to their expressions, these ill-at-ease figures are painted with an intensely cheerful palette. With masterful and humorous self deprecation, Farin here communicates a discontinuity between inner world and outer, self and other, individual and community. Farin’s heavy use of patterns is also significant: they liken it to camouflage, granting their subjects the ability to ‘hide in plain sight’ as they absently crouch, sit, think and walk through their vibrant landscapes.
The residency in Amsterdam allowed Katja Farin space and time to develop central themes in their work. Of particular influence was the dutch urban geography, which structures many of Farin’s compositions, such as long stretches of canal, and inner-city detritus which pepper the canvases. The body of work from the residency also continues Farin’s liberal use of perspective in their work. In the manner of Gerard Garouste, Farin’s paintings take on the quality of carnival mirrors: their figures often have awkwardly large, small or long limbs, buildings skew mischievously, horizons stretch infinitely, and clothes dribble beyond their demarcated outlines. Here, the misbehaviour of the painting’s figures serve not only to explore themes of body dysmorphia and how we tessellate within the world, but also to gently probe the fabric of our social reality – along what axis do we differentiate between the real and the fake?
Farin’s work explores categories of chance, luck and manipulation through symbols that reference magic and the occult: levitating playing cards, dice, coins, and mice. In this context, Farin’s use of magical equipment hints at a desire for idealised outcomes, but also presents a darker edge: the potential for cheating, deceit, and manipulation. Describing their work as informed by growing up on the internet and the social landscape of Los Angeles where Farin lives and works, these charged motifs can be read as an anxiety about control and how we relate to the world.
Katja Farin (b. 1996) received a BA in Fine Art from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2018. Farin has gone on to have several solo exhibitions, in and around the US, such as Hum of Virtue, in Lieu Gallery, Los Angeles, 202, Lines From Arguments, Lubov NYC, New York, 2020, and Carry, Carries, Carried, in Lieu Gallery, Los Angeles, 2019. They have also exhibited in several group exhibitions, such as PAPA RAGAZZE! At Nicodim Gallery, and It’s a sad and beautiful world…, at Wilding Cran Gallery, both in Los Angeles in 2020. Farin lives and works in Los Angeles.
In situ
Untitled,
Felice Casorati
True Cards, 2022
Katja Farin