Portrait
Portrait
Kerstin Arnold’s artistic view of reality
"Pictures have to be realistic so that people will look at them." It's this conviction that is the central thread that runs through the work of independent artist Kerstin Arnold.
She wants to hold a mirror up to society in order to get it to stop and think. And she does it too: With imagery that stands with both feet in the here and now. Her large-format works - mostly still lifes or groups of people - Kerstin Arnold sees as a documentation of her time. "It interests me how people dress, how they behave and how they act towards each other", says Arnold, who favours strong colours and whose detail-obsessed exactness lends her pictures unusual definition and precision.
With this Kerstin Arnold is a world away from simply creating a copy of the photorealistic original. It is much more her view, her perception of reality, which she wishes to share with the beholder. It's an approach that has continued to excite the self-taught artist for many years now, and one which she continues to develop, step by step, as she works on her art in her atelier. In this way she has over the last ten years not only refined her painting technique but also, through work on still lifes as well as through the contract work she undertakes for a renowned publisher of art prints, come steadily closer to the subject of people.
"The Freedom to Travel" is the name of one of her most recent series, for which Arnold photographed models in highly particular situations and contexts. In the creative process the photographs act as the original drafts, which through the act of painting are transformed and modified and thereby gain an additional semantic value which serves to lift them above the photographic similarity to reality.
Kerstin Arnold's expectations of herself and the quality of her work are high. A correspondingly great amount of time is spent in her atelier. "Because of this my pictures make a statement against the hectic rush that governs our society", says Kerstin Arnold.
Kerstin Arnold was born in 1964 in Chemnitz. Already at school her marked artistic talent was noticed. The recommendation to go to art school in the German Democratic Republic was however not followed by Kerstin Arnold as she wanted no part of the ideological brainwashing that was the norm there. In 1989 Arnold left the GDR for political reasons and moved to Saarbrücken, capital of the West German state of Saarland. Pictures by Kerstin Arnold have been shown in exhibitions in New York, Saarbrücken and Losheim.
Text: Alexandra Raetzer