Carolina Nitsch is pleased to present Kitchen Pieces, an exhibition by German artist Karin Sander. This is the artist’s first exhibition at Carolina Nitsch Project Room.

Karin Sander is a conceptual artist whose work is not easily defined by medium or subject, rather a consistent engagement in institutions, site specificity and context, which commands a viewer’s attention and introspection. Her projects are technically complex such as her 3-D body scans series of living persons. Other projects utilize simple common objects but may take days to complete such as the highly polished chicken eggs and interior walls. All her projects are based on context, research, art, history and architecture. The work resorts to means that exist in our norm, and this becomes visible, legible and demonstrated in its ambiguity.

The Kitchen Pieces, a series of fresh fruits and vegetables carefully affixed, precisely nailed to a wall, command the observer’s attention by casting doubt on the reality of the object. When presented on the wall as an art object, the ordinariness of the fruit or vegetable is immediately confounded, and the viewer assumes it is not a still life, it’s not a painting, not a sculpture, it is not synthetic, it is the real fruit. The installation is set in a straight line at eye level where the objects seem weightlessly hanging on the wall. Each is an individual piece in the series and is accompanied by a signed certificate with a custom, forged stainless-steel nail with which to attach the piece.

The fruit or vegetable is freshly supplied by the collector who replaces his specific Kitchen Piece on the wall whenever he wishes, which adds a further layer of complexity as the objects decay or dry like a flower. As Eva Menasse wrote about these works; “The artist has disingenuously labelled these real vegetables Kitchen Pieces. Exhibited like this, they immediately pose like pieces of pop art, looking as if they were sprouting out of the wall and might any minute burst into song. Karin Sander is truly a friendly witch, with minimal effort making everyday objects appear so artificial that our mental processes and perceptive powers have no choice but to spring into action.”

Karin Sander is the recipient of the Rome-Prize of the German Academy in Rome. She has had solo exhibitions at Temporäre Kunsthalle, Berlin, Humboldt Lab Dahlem, Berlin; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, Berlin; Kunstmuseum St. Gallen; K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; The Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2018 she will have a solo exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Winterthur, CH. The artist lives in Berlin and Zürich.