In the exhibition False Flat , Karin Karlsson's work in Norway is presented for the first time. The exhibition consists of new works on paper that are on the borderland between drawing and sculpture. In Karlsson's work, we often find the drawing's classic tools such as intersection point, value differences, line and surface. But where these techniques are normally used to create volume and depth, Karlsson uses them instead to create drawings that function as objects rather than images.
There is also a link to sculpture in the work process. The process that leads to the handmade paper has many moments: recycled paper is soaked and then transformed into a pulp which is then formed into sheets which are allowed to dry. By starting from the material itself and letting it describe weight, mass, gravity and volume, paper and graphite are freed from their historically representative and imaginative connection to reality, and allowed to be themselves.
The exhibition's title False Flat is taken from cycling and is used to describe when something appears flat to the eye, but which in reality has a slight slope. It is not the optical illusion itself that Karlsson is looking for, but a collapse of categories where questions of flatness and depth are something that concerns both the drawing's surface and shape. The term twists and turns the dimensions and resolves the difference between two- and three-dimensionality in a way that makes it possible for us to look at the otherwise impossible.
Karin Karlsson (b. 1984), lives and works in Stockholm. She is a graduate of the Royal College of Art in Stockholm and the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen.
