Karen Kilimnik

Catalog of an exhibition held at the ARC Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris, October 27, 2006-January 7, 2007 and at the Serpentine Gallery, London, 2007. In the 1980s, critics compared Karen Kilimnik’s narrative and jumbled installations to the previous decade’s “scatter art”, they have since become cult favorites of a new generation of artists and curators. Her drawings and paintings from the early 1990s targeted then-current discussions on art and glamour, and the emergence of women artists whose sensibility was not that of feminist theory. A portrait of Hugh Grant, post-arrest, was likened to Degas, Warhol and Jim Shaw’s Thrift Store Paintings. More recently she’s taken up fairy-tale themes, with dashing barons, tinkling chandeliers, wolves and sleighs-a magical world in which history, myth and reality coexist. The diversity of Kilimnik’s work, which has continued to evolve, can veil the internal coherence of a practice in which the most recent pieces attest to continuous links through all previous media and subject matter. This comprehensive monograph offers a complete panorama of Kilimnik’s career production, and allows readers to see beyond the distinctions between her paintings, drawings and installations.