| Born in 1964, Caro Suerkemper’s works entangle the onlooker in thoughts about the interaction of perception and wish, enticement and compliance, desire and control, power and helplessness. The Berlin-based artist dresses her keen interest in differences in optical stimuli and shimmering colors; peculiar sketching suffuses the self-representation of her figures. The comic effect in no way robs the pictures of their contrasting energy; it increases their potential to confuse. Suerkemper’s small watercolors and gouaches as well as her ceramic sculptures almost exclusively place women in the spotlight. Many of these characters appear constrained, whether they are wearing traditional dresses or stripped naked in bizarre lust and bondage scenarios. |  |
Galerie Roemerapotheke, Zurich/Berlin
Born in 1964, Caro Suerkemper’s works entangle the onlooker in thoughts about the interaction of perception and wish, enticement and compliance, desire and control, power and helplessness. The Berlin-based artist dresses her keen interest in differences in optical stimuli and shimmering colors; peculiar sketching suffuses the self-representation of her figures. The comic effect in no way robs the pictures of their contrasting energy; it increases their potential to confuse. Suerkemper’s small watercolors and gouaches as well as her ceramic sculptures almost exclusively place women in the spotlight. Many of these characters appear constrained, whether they are wearing traditional dresses or stripped naked in bizarre lust and bondage scenarios. The uniform effect of the tightly tied bodices of their dresses contrasts with the voluntary bondage rituals: images which are prim and proper on the one hand and crazy on the other mirror real orders and conventions in equal measure. They collide with Suerkemper’s style of representation, which affords the color itself a life of its own. Watercolors surround the characters with flowing mood settings, melting the contours and unraveling motive correlations in the form of islands sparingly set against the white of the paper. The color is disconnected from the function of the markings.
Consequently, there’s an ambiguous approximation to many of the scenes that she paints. Suerkemper prefers to merely hint at stories; she seeks a state of suspense with an uncertain outcome. Her works link the loose ends of storylines with tense momentary images which often remind us of snapshots or stills from films through their suggestive illumination. The close similarity to photography and the cinema reveal that Suerkemper’s motifs aren’t so much inventions as finds. The artist chooses her raw material from the bottomless pit of images that anyone can access in books, magazines, and on the Internet. Some of the motifs withstand Suerkemper’s analytical eye and undergo a process of transfer and assimilation, which leads to what in some cases are tiny pencil sketches and on to watercolors and gouaches. The old contexts are cast off during the transition from someone else’s picture to her own. It requires the onlooker to make it new.
