Allice KÜNSTLER biographyAlice Künstler, 1974 born by a German/Polish mother and a Belgium father, grew up on the land in a little village in Belgium. Going several times a year to Germany, she has always loved travelling and languages. 1993 is when it all started. Her best friend was studying photography and Alice helped her, sometimes advising her and of course learning, too. When she arrived in Bristol in 1999 to study languages, she also joined a course of drawing and painting. Since then, she never stopped photography and drawing.
Alice is a multidisciplinary artist. Her practice embraces painting, drawing and photography. Her work is diverse though thematically linked.
Dark mono-types, sometimes simple, drawings with ink sometimes crowded with fragile characters, grotesques, terrible visions drawn with sharp pastels, coloured pencils or watercolours. Nothing is rubbed, leaving people or nature simply as they are as perfection doesn't exist in our world. Her works represent the human condition, deformed, defective, emotionally fragile and the beauty of nature which is above us all. An infinite tenderness emanates from those sometimes coarse features, a little childish yet full of soft maturity which indicates to us the richness of the differences, the fragility, the contradictions.
Her photographic work is an echo of her drawings : intimate portraits or abandoned landscapes, composed in-frame, viewed through reflections, soft mist or through the skew of solitary objects, an attachment to the world around.
Alice does not digitally manipulate her photos, like her drawing aren't corrected; preferring the reality of the unadulterated image; documentary rather than'reality make-over'.
In this way Alice's work is remarkable : treating the blackness and dark corners, defects and foibles without forgetting the smoothness and poetry of life.
Alice and the other side of the picture.
Written by Julie Dumont |