Karin Elise Sturm’s Art

by Clara Kaufmann

Karin Elise Sturm’s art is powerful, stirring and shocking. But also witty, open and surreal. The power and quality of her images are not generated from technical craftsmanship, beguiling realism, or intellectual abstraction, but stem from authenticity, directness, freedom from constraint, and constancy. The images have an urgency—they demand to be expressed—and you feel that as an observer.

Karin Elise Sturm’s drawings are an ambivalent mixture of baroque opulence in content and austerity in technique. And that’s a good thing—if the density of their content were expressed opulently, they would be overwhelming.

In 2014, Karin Elise Sturm discovered a technique that actualizes this special mixture of content and technique: drawing on a smartphone or tablet. Karin Elise Sturm uses the pre-installed note taking app—no complicated drawing program, no elaborate functions or trendy filters. Just the empty cold whiteness of the digital screen and on it simple, dynamic line drawings—clear hard unforgiving digital lines that do not hide uncertainty or shakiness. Even when Karin Sturm places differing depths into some of the drawings, the different surfaces and levels push into each other. The overall appearance remains entirely on the surface. The word plane comes to mind here with its homophone plain and also plainly—simple, unadorned, clear, unmistakable, pure, unadulterated, undiluted, definite, unhindered, uninterrupted. Surprisingly, all of the adjectives listed could describe Sturm’s art—even if, for the sake of completeness, you would have to add the respective antonyms next to them in order to do justice to Karin Elise Sturm’s drawings. Because they cannot easily be reduced to a common denominator.

The flatness of her style is diametrically opposed to the depth of the content of her art. It may be that the images are 2-dimensional exactly because the content alone has such depth. They are projected from Karin Elise Sturm’s (sub)conscious directly onto the image surface—they need no depth because they are depth. It seems as if the pen in the artist’s hand provides immediate access to a continuum between unconscious and conscious memory, feeling and perception that is otherwise usually only revealed during sleep. Others dream, Karin Elise Sturm draws. So she has, as in dream, only a limited influence on what appears and occurs. Banal everyday impressions mix with grievous experiences, creating surreal mixtures that often surprise the artist herself—whose meaning she can’t necessarily unlock at will.

The fact that drawing gives Sturm such direct access to inner themes certainly has something to do with the path that led her to fine art. In the beginning, painting and drawing were for her instruments for dealing with trauma. A non-verbal form of expression made it possible to confront the unspeakable and to bring inner images that had been repressed for decades back to the surface of consciousness to process them. When painting like this, every stroke has meaning, filled with emotion—there is no arbitrariness. Karin Elise Sturm’s path to art did not pass through the academy but through pain. She has now discovered painting as a means of artistic expression beyond trauma. But the directness, relevance and intensity of expression have remained, just as Karin Elise Sturm was able to preserve the method of drawing from the hand not from the mind. It is not intellect that decides what she draws, it is intuition.

Over the many years that Karin Elise Sturm has been drawing, she has developed her very own original visual language that is highly recognizable. This includes a vocabulary of referential structures and shapes that recur, such as spirals which sometimes give the impression of crosshairs. Abstract figures that evoke cephalopods often populate the pictures in greater or lesser numbers. A skyline-like silhouette can also often be seen, referring to Sturm’s yearning for New York, as well as a severely foreshortened street that leads into the depths (and yet stretches into the surface). The viewer does not clearly grasp the meaning of the symbolic abbreviations—posing a mystery, one may not know what they mean but one feels that they carry meaning. These abbreviations interact with the main protagonists of Sturm’s images, usually people and/or animals, but also trees, mountains or edifices. What’s more, type plays a consistent role; sometimes the title of the picture is placed directly in with large letters that seize space and are almost brutal.

Karin Elise Sturm’s daily impressions nurture her drawings, be it while traveling, in Vienna or at home relaxed watching Netflix or the news. A detail catches her eye and demands to be drawn at once. The detail becomes the main actor of the image, no longer referencing its original context but newly contextualized. It is not a reproduction but a type of appropriation, making it one’s own. Translating a complex real image into Karin Elise Sturm’s clear formally simple visual language brings out the (or an) essence of what is seen, giving a superficial television image sudden depth and the suggestion that behind (almost) everything is buried more than the visible, polished surface. Accessories are left out—or made central. Sturm’s reduction to rough lines has tremendous sophistication. Her linework is spontaneous and dynamic, it’s not about perfection, it’s about flow and movement. It’s not about drawing “beautifully” and “correctly” but rather truthfully and authentically. What is seen / the impression / the optical stimulus mixes in the picture with imagination and memory, past and future, always and now, fantasy and reality. Karin Elise Sturm doesn’t plan her images, she lets them emerge and happen as detached as possible from a conscious artistic-intellectual desire. The everyday is surreally combined with the unexpected and surprising, and endowed with formalistic, recurring symbols. What was originally easily recognizable is difficult to read and takes on a dream-like—and from time to time mysterious—appearance that could bring to mind prophetic premonitions. The images are a force, they carry you away, among other things giving the previously superficial depth and testifying to an unbridled creative power.

We live in a society of optical surfaces—in a time of self-dramatization and self-optimization, of cosmetic surgery and beauty filters on every smartphone. Appearance is often more important than essence—inner emptiness is not as bad as an empty calendar. On social media we are surrounded by (apparently) perfect lives in perfect pictures—in film, television, and adverts too there are no mistakes (anymore). In this perfected world, Sturm’s pictures are a beneficence in every respect. They show that the imperfect also has a right to exist, that in authenticity, in genuineness, lies a power and fascination that eclipses every perfect surface. Sturm picks out details from our oversaturated, smooth visual environment, which all too often makes us passive consumer addicts, and bestows them with a restorative depth and meaning. She shows us that we can engage with our environment actively, creatively and constructively. Between Netflix, New York and sewing machines, Karin Elise Sturm spins her cosmos from imagination, impulsiveness, courage, authenticity, freedom and imperfection.

(Clara Kaufmann)