Being at the top is highly overrated Painting

Order now: brand new catalogue! Karin Bos (1966, NL) graduated at the Amsterdam School of Fine Arts in 1989. She works as a visual artist in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her main media are painting, drawing and printing. More information: People and nature are the focus point of her work. Main characters are usually girls or women. Especially mutual relative power and relations have her interest. Frictions and inequality in these relationships is a recurrent theme. For instance between man and woman, or adult and child, or children amongst each other, group behavior versus the loner. When the pursuit of harmony fails, it becomes interesting for her work. Several examples of 'girlpower' series Karin Bos has accomplished are 'Showgirls', 'Gamegirls', 'Fairyqueens' and 'Feel Good'. In her recent work there is a shift towards the landscape. Karin Bos asked herself if she could tell something about people without having them literally in sight. It resulted in fairytale-like landscapes with an ominous undertone, where always something odd is present. These 'Slightly Creepy Camping Sites' are paintings of barns, sheds and abandoned caravans in harsh landscapes which get their suspense no longer by the act or look of the main character, but by the use of color, light and the way it is painted. Important in her work is the suggestion. It evokes a cinematic world, a world of stories, where nothing is what it seems, and where a merry holiday scene could as well be the site of a terrible crime. This tension, this ambiguity is what interests Karin Bos as an artist. Outdoor life and nature play a large part in her recent work. Because in the Netherlands infrastructure and urbanization are so widely present, it is difficult for her to find landscapes she can use as a source for her work. All Dutch 'nature' is planned, organized and designed. Therefore she has done several artist-in-residencies abroad. She focuses on landscapes that provoke mixed feelings. What attracts her is space, 'ugliness' and roughness of the scenery, the intensity of colors and light, and the ruthlessness of nature. It is not there to please. It has a dark side, which fits her work very well. Recently she celebrated a very successful retrospective which was on view at the Contemporary Art Museum CAB in Burgos, Spain in 2020. (with catalogue). In 2017/18 at the Contemporary Art Museum CODA in Apeldoorn, the Netherlands.