Karin Batten's "Swimming on Mars": Paintings and Sculpture

The late Martica Sawin, art critic, author, and art historian, wrote that, on Batten’s travels, she draws and takes photos of the natural world that find their way into her paintings, which also make reference to space technology, seascapes, and aerial views of urban landscapes. Drawing on experiences with ceramics, metal sculpture, and various  materials, she builds paintings with unified, richly textured surfaces that have the tactile feel of sculpture.

Batten explains that in recent years she has built visual worlds based on memories from her childhood, travels, long-distance swimming, space technology, seascapes, and aerial views of urban landscapes. In her mixed media paintings, she uses the brightness of light to depict the exotic atmosphere and textures of the land and water she has experienced. Batten improvises with shapes, digital images, collage, texture, rich fields of color, and space.

She writes that her work is inspired by the vivid, unique places she discovers. While traveling and swimming. These authentic discoveries leave me with a feeling for intense color that I work to capture in my paintings. I am left with each work having its own story and its unique world.

Batten’s brilliantly colored, unpredictable, and lyrical forms with random gestural markings redefine painterly space as she explores abstraction and representation. Complex with delightfully curious patterns, ambiguous with identity, each painting contains a representative image left on the cusp of perception.

Batten’s paintings feature distinct visible shapes that do not depend on traditional Western art convention, the structured ranking of form hierarchy.  Batten’s sense of freedom allows her to continue creating mesmerizing color paintings, and to influence  form. She re-characterizes the laws of gravity, to distort perspective, while remaining anchored by the abstract qualities of the paint, intense hues, deep textures, and swirling brushstrokes, as seen in (Swimming on Mars, 2018, mixed media on panel, 36 x 40 inches).

While Batten concedes to working spontaneously and intuitively, losing all boundaries, much like ‘swimming on Mars.’ She says, “I ruminate over my work a long time, attempting to transcend my inflexible upbringing in the bleakness of bombed-out Hamburg in postwar Germany.”

Batten lives and works in New York. She was educated in Hamburg, London, and New York, where she earned a master’s degree in fine arts from Hunter College. In 2019, Batten was awarded a Pollock-Krasner grant. Her work has been exhibited in many one-person and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe, including Berlin, Paris, and Zürich. She is represented in numerous public and private collections, including the National September 11 Memorial and Museum, New York; Belk Visual Arts Center, Davidson College, North Carolina; The Federal Reserve Bank of New York, Pfizer Incorporated, New York, Reliance National Insurance, New York, Gallerie 70, Berlin, Germany and the US Embassy, Mbabane, Swaziland, Africa.

For further information and images, please visit www.junekellygallery.com.