Karin Preller | Slightly out of focus: things unseen

In this exhibition I return to still life, an enduring interest. Most of the objects depicted are either my own or those displayed in a friend’s house, photographed and archived over many years. The paintings stand as evidence of objects acquired and treasured, moved and displayed over time, so that one recognises the same object in different settings in different paintings. The pink rabbit sits in a vase next to a number of nodding dogs, and appears again on top of a kitchen cupboard, above a postcard of New York. The yellow and orange robot appears, blurred, in some paintings, and, serendipitously, on a tin in another painting. The objects become shrines to existence; repositories of memory and obsession; testaments to the stories of their owner or those to whom they once belonged.

The paintings make visible the central role that the camera’s mediation plays in my process. They are emphatically photographic in the way in which they have been painted: in the flattening of shadows and light; depth and shallowness of field; the blur effected by the camera; and the contrast between vibrant colour and monochrome grey, the latter a reference to my work based on old black and white photographs and film stills. Photography sets the subject matter at a double remove, adding to the haunting and melancholy stillness that underlies the apparent chaotic compositions.

While at first glance evocative of the phenomenon of the cabinet of curiosities, the paintings invite reflection beyond their deceptive simplicity, to conversations that might be opened up by the objects in each painting and the paintings in relation to each other. The objects bear mute witness to their surroundings, remote from that which falls outside of their confined spaces. In a sense every still life is a memento mori – a reminder of the fragility and transience of existence, of the immutable and silent presence of objects,

I quote the late art historian and critic Gerhard Schoeman (2013:92):
As with her hauntingly empty Richterian paintings based on family snapshots, for which she is best known, Karin Preller bases her still lifes on photographs, which archive the past while simultaneously becoming part of an archive. Doubly archival, photographs are gigantic and miniature.

Time, as continuity, is absent in a photograph; flawed record of an insignificant, fleeting moment when light bounced off an object into the camera, in just this way, at this time. Yet we look to the photograph to remind us that we were there. Preller’s paintings based on photographs reanimate the time traced and lost in a photograph. Her invisible brushstrokes are testimony to time lived. Even though we can’t see the brushstrokes, we see them in their absence. Brushstrokes tell time. Painting layers time. Preller’s smooth paintings …urge us to give them time, to take time, by drawing us nearer and then becoming impenetrable once more.

Schoeman, G. 2013. Like Lacan’s dancing sardine can. Art South Africa 12 (1): 92.

This show runs from 23-25 May 2025.