She painted Paris Hilton as Marie Antoinette and Leonardo DiCaprio as Prince Charming. Full of fantasy, Karen Kilimnik has asserted a poetic sense and limitless freedom since the 90s. Advocating a return to figurative painting, the American artist also practiced a lot of installation, in works summoning a bric-a-brac of eclectic references, leaving it to our imagination to write our own novel.
Para Éric Trony.
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One of the main ambassadors of the revival of painting
Karen Kilimnik did a lot of good to contemporary art, opening a whole bunch of doors, suggesting formal avenues, affirming a poetic sense and limitless freedom. A few years before inflicting a severe correction on the visual arts, she studied, between 1974 and 1976, art and architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia.
If she declared that she had Russian paternal origins, we actually know very little about him – among which the fact that in the 1980s she exercised the profession, ideal in her eyes, of guardian of pet cats. In fact, she never attended openings or events that art constantly invents, and never gives almost not d’interview.
When she agreed, she was more willing to answer questions about her favorite animal (“Everything you like about felines.†) or on his favorite vacation (“Halloween, because I love costumes; and Christmas, because of the decorations and the songs.†), becausein truth, she is not with us. We obviously imagine her elsewhere, in the agitated world she expresses.
At the start of the 1990s, she set in motion an operation just as unexpected as the content of her works: just as she affirmed the genre of the installation and explored its possibilities, she also became one of the main ambassadors of the revival of painting. Less attention was probably paid to his pictorial works, as they were obscured by his large installations, but Kilimnik always painted – on canvas or sheets of paper, patiently constructing a pantheon of cats, horses, movie stars or people from royal families.
Karen Kilimnik’s small oil paintings, between the 18th century and pop culture
His small oil paintings (his canvases are never very large) admit their fascination for 18th century painting and pay homage to it by submitting it to pop culture : in his Prince Charming (1998), we recognize Leonardo DiCaprio, and in his canvas Marie-Antoinette out for a Walk at Her Petite Hermitage, France, 1750 (2005), Paris Hilton.
She demonstrates her Très grande aptitude à la peinturewith a singular sense of color, and takes the viewer into gardens where flowering groves triumph, into the boxes of the Palais Garnier with the little rats (Wednesday + Eloise at Ballet School at the Paris Opera, Degas or Wednesday + Friend at Ballet School at the Paris Opera, Degas2003-2011) where in the jungle in Vietnam (The Green Fairy Cottage in the Vietnamese Jungle2015).
During the winter of 2023, in his last exhibition at the Sprüth Magers gallery in Berlinshe showed her Beach Paintings for a Winter Escapea rather subversive set of marine views, beaches with coconut trees (The Beach at Pub Tiki Island2023 et The Beach and Sea2022), maritime charts (Flowers for the Queen, Scotland2022) and myself from criques secrètes (Your Wish Is My Command, the Secret Cove2023).
A “spectacular exhibition†in Zurich next June
We can’t resist the pleasure of ces titres in the form of haikus terracescuriously precise, and which nourish the viewer’s imagination. It therefore offered sandy beaches to an art today very obsessed with all forms of discrimination and poverty… and showed, incidentally, what the painting of Raoul Dufy did to his.
For my part, I don’t like to know what an upcoming exhibition has in store for me, and I keep a good distance from reading press releases. Nothing replaces surpriseand, in this matter, it would be very imprudent to write that we will see, in his “spectacular exhibition†In Zurich, paintings or photographs, and again what these paintings or photographs will evoke.
But because it is very rare, Karen Kilimnik gives her exhibitions a suspense worthy of television series which she particularly likes – the next episode is always too long to come. Preceded by a career of almost fifty years, the art that she presents today flourishes without having given up anything. Especially not freedom.
“Karen Kilimnik†, exhibition from 12 to 24 July 2026 at the Eva Presenhuber Gallery, Zurich.
