Karin Sander

Born in Bensberg in 1957, Karin Sander lives and works in Berlin and Zurich.

1. 1. Known for her pointedly conceptual works — which include installations, architectural interventions, 3D scans, photographs, works in various media — Karin Sander works with contexts and conditions of the sites in question, be it in art institutions or in all kinds of public spaces.
   3. Her work has appeared in numerous solo and group exhibitions.  Solo exhibitions include the Haus am Waldsee (Berlin, 2018), the Kunstmuseum Villa Zanders (Bergisch Gladbach, 2017), the Lehmbruck Museum (Duisburg, 2013), the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen (St. Gallen, 2010) and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K20 (Düsseldorf, 2010).  Recent group exhibitions include the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (Baden Baden, 2018), the ZKM – Center for Art and Media (Karlsruhe, 2017), the Israel Museum (Jerusalem, 2016), the Busan Museum of Art (Busan, 2016), the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, MUDAM (Luxembourg, 2014), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2012), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 2010) and the 9th Sharjah Biennial (Sharjah, 2009).

www.karinsander.de

The Collector’s Edition Box by Karin Sander for Lab’Bel
by Michael Staab, associate curator. 

Known for her pointedly conceptual work, Karin Sander works with the contexts and conditions of the sites in question, be it in art institutions or in a variety of public spaces. As a meticulous observer, she alters a viewer’s perception by means of minute shifts in the perspective of common objects or familiar situations, manipulating our view of the world and sharpening our focus on it.

For her design of The Laughing Cow® Collector’s Edition Box, Karin Sander has chosen a dotted matrix pattern first encountered in 2015 on a train journey from Rome to Zurich, which gave rise to her series Reisebilder (Travel Shots). The windows of her coach were covered with large-scale advertisements, revealing the outside world only through the filter of a dotted grid. Sander’s momentary irritation quickly turned into curiosity, which gave rise to an exhilarating discovery: a new, technically modified way of seeing and grasping environments. Instead of presenting a clear view of the countryside, Sander’s Travel Shots captured the passing landscape through this dotted filter. The external world was thus dissolved into an assemblage of colored dots, evoking a range of aesthetic styles: from silkscreen prints, to the abstract painting technique of pointillism, to the pixelated structure of digital images. In the same way, upon seeing the label’s green meadows, woods, and mountains through countless tiny holes of the Collector’s Edition Box, viewers are drawn into a pointillistic landscape. It sets the imagination free, offering a profoundly new experience of a subject we think we know so well.