Kathrin Landa

Kathrin Landa is devoted to portrait painting. She therefore belongs to the great exceptions within contemporary art, which has, despite its return to figuration, widely ignored portraiture so far. In Kathrin Landa’s works, portraiture has been emancipated from the original submission and commitment to the client, and serves as a medium for an independent artistic expression.

Her main interest in her portraits lies in painting...

Kathrin Landa is devoted to portrait painting. She therefore belongs to the great exceptions within contemporary art, which has, despite its return to figuration, widely ignored portraiture so far. In Kathrin Landa’s works, portraiture has been emancipated from the original submission and commitment to the client, and serves as a medium for an independent artistic expression.

Her main interest in her portraits lies in painting itself. Regardless of the accurate reproduction, Kathrin Landa first of all deals with shape, color, and complexion – the highly complicated tonality and plasticity of the body’s surfaces. This is anything but painting just for the sake of painting, but rather about the creation of animated portraits that develop their own life beyond the randomness of the moment, a life that at best outlives the motif and can be experienced again and again. This requires the recipients’ cooperation. Good artists know how to take this into account. If they succeed, a visually based exchange of ideas is developed on several levels. What starts as a dialog between model and painter continues as the viewer’s inner dialog with the portrait. Thus, portraits are multiple offers to perceive people: through the eye of the painter, by the view of the depicted, or through the perspective of the one who seeks a relation to both in his very own way. Such portraits develop a strong presence in the long run.

Kathrin Landa meets this requirement like almost no other artist, and therefore ranks, not without reason, as a major painter. Without intending to be narrative, her portraits time and again generate virtually literary characters whose silent energy makes us perceive a sort of breathing that necessarily draws our attention to her pictures. Born in Tettnang in 1980, Kathrin Landa spent her childhood and youth in the Upper Swabian towns of Ravensburg and Weingarten. She studied at the Akademie für Bildende Künste Mainz under Friedemann Hahn, and at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig under Sighard Gille, where she later also became a master class student of Annette Schröter’s. Given additional studying abroad at the École des Beaux Arts in Lyon, her artistic education has been more than thorough, making her a master of her craft.
Kathrin Landa is the initiator of the MalerinnenNetzWerk Berlin-Leipzig (MNW), which she established in 2015.

Without a doubt, Landa’s artistic concept has been influenced by the meanwhile legendary New Leipzig School. This is characterized by a figurative and yet abstract approach to painting, a kind of painting that is capable of initially perceiving the body as an unknown form comprised of recesses and curvatures and surfaces, as an event of nuanced plays of light, shadow and color, which still lives beyond the obligations of function and definition. Even if man is the focus of her art: Kathrin Landa does not intend to create photorealistic replications but to reflect the artist’s perceptive view of the model in the intensity of artistic expression. This means: animating matter, painterly presenting a personality. In this process, Kathrin Landa is interested in painting’s very own phenomena, resulting in two different readings of her pictures, wherein both the joy in painterly explorations and the interest in knowing man – which constitutes her art – are found.
The pictures do not want to be spectacular, which they are for this very reason. They create, by sensitively balanced compositional means, the illusion of an unobtrusive and yet highly authentic presence of the depicted persons. The latter are often gazing vaguely into space. The backgrounds are mere allusions, intentionally missing details. This leaves space for interpretation. But even without looking right back at the viewer, the portraits trigger an almost uncomfortable sympathy. We start making speculations about the model’s fate, assign him or her a story that might be guessed but is yet mostly fed from our own experiences. Thus, Kathrin Landa makes us narrators of a strange and yet close life.

This is based on a complex artistic process. Portrait painting is a long and carefully unfolding way to the picture. One could write a paper only on the choice of the models, not all of whom are from the artist’s personal environment. Kathrin Landa regards it a special task to invite unknown persons she is interested in into her Berlin studio for an artistic examination, which enables a purely artistic approach that is beyond the usual expectations connected to commissions. This is no longer about this one person, but about man himself, a certain degree of transcending time. Artistic success means for Landa to transpose this momentum into the picture.

The way there every time starts all over again. After intensive talks, different poses of the model are tried out. The preliminary drawing on the canvas delivers the crucial guideline for the painting. The painting process lasts weeks and months. Kathrin Landa models and modulates with colors, layers are added, overpaintings emphasize features, other things vanish. In this way, the work gradually becomes apparent as the sum of painterly decisions. Every picture reveals the painter’s passion for her subject: the exploration of the nuances of the flesh tint, the careful balancing of the color fields and their well-orchestrated mixture. Kathrin Landa feels the tension when she approaches the point where more painting would actually make the picture less complete. So many a passage remains open. The visible traces of the painting process correspond to a logic that strives for absolute honesty and does not conceal anything. Kathrin Landa does not deceive us. She has no need for idealization or staging, just as little as for accessories and costumes. Therefore, the people in her pictures are always completely in touch with themselves and in their own time that does not agree with artificial finery. The pictures owe their life to painting itself – to the semi colors, the lightening and darkening, the peculiarities of the shades between ochre, turquoise and grey. In short: Kathrin Landa is a true painter.

© Martin Oswald