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“Step right in! Take a cuddly toy and visit the exhibition, surrender to the groove of the Kinky Creatures! The guitars are already getting in the mood with another beer and are enjoying the idyll in the glow of a fading mushroom cloud! Please come in, step right in!”
Before we get that far, and can contemplate the skewed idyll of an irradiated world in the last room of Katrin Plavčak’s exhibition, we encounter a number of creatures, ghosts and a carpet whose pair of eyes arrests our gaze – looking out, childlike, questioning and astonished, into a world that may be as strange and unfamiliar as the one offered to us by the paintings of ghosts at a phantom meal or of tadpole figures exchanging thoughts. And the fuzzy little thing we hold in our hands and nestle against our cheek may be soft and gentle, yet somehow strange too, as if these cosy reifications of childlike fantasies, in which even cruelty feels cuddly, had been violently dismembered and hastily reassembled into hybrid beings. The body of a snake with the head of a plush toy begging for love ... how cute! Mickey Mouse – a small animal like that would be easy prey, or rather hunted prey, for a real snake.
The playful cheerfulness that buoys and delights us in the exhibition leaves an unsettling short-circuit scenario unspoken and hides it behind a colourful curtain. The heat of this big bang makes meanings and forms melt and arise anew. Shattered meanings are thus fused anew, and verbal inventions are staged as scenes in the paintings: pictures in which presence of mind also means the presence of ghosts, and in which topics of conversation are quite literally objectified and brought to the table as things.
Katrin Plavčak speaks of a “parallel world” in which we live because we overlook the obvious or do not want to see it: man-made destruction of nature, the violence of war, animal suffering and mindless consumption. In her pictures she makes use of the appeal of soft fabrics and forms, and at times the canvases themselves become textiles with plush appliqués. They can be touched and soothingly banish the irritations that might frighten us when ghosts devour hand grenades at a phantom meal. The playful lightness is deceptive, for the artist uses reshaped content and elements of popular culture to make matters that seem to lie beyond the visible in our parallel universe acceptable – and precisely thereby visible after all.
Paradoxically, estrangement as a strategy of politically enlightening cultural production seems to have been inverted: for we have made ourselves at home in estrangement, pursue invented promises and stories, and numb ourselves through consumption.
Sociologically, such behaviour can be interpreted as the product of a late-capitalist need for regression: since the world around us seems to be becoming increasingly incomprehensible and diffuse, and formerly binding values offer scarcely any foothold or orientation, we indulge in a hedonism driven by infantile wish-production, which only makes what we seek to avoid all the more urgent and threatening.
Katrin Plavčak gets us grooving, puts us in the mood, seduces us with cuddly fantasy creatures, softens passageways with colourful doors and opens up a cheerfully attuned world in which objects are animate and forms become fluid. What is said playfully and with a transfiguring touch can be seen – and the paintings are well worth seeing. A childlike, regressive world of carefree cheerfulness, driven by fantastical exuberance? Behind the garishly colourful curtains of this enchanting spectacle, a stage also becomes visible on which other plays are performed, using concepts from the adult world.
Psychology knows the concepts of the transitional object and the transitional space. Transitional objects are, accordingly, mostly cuddly things that the small child takes up in the phase of separation from the mother as a temporary substitute for the absent mother. With the help of the transitional object, states of being alone thus become bearable, and in the imaginative shaping of an invented world, later creative activity develops out of the child’s inventive play.
In the intermediate transitional space – which is how the exhibition can be understood – Katrin Plavčak condenses the world’s impositions into graceful scenes. “I infiltrate and subvert and celebrate whatever and however I want!” she says, and has us celebrate, abysmally, the sensualised idyll before the world’s collapse in an atomic explosion together with the guitars. They have already got themselves in the mood with a beer and are getting a little out of shape. “You too, be formless – that is, not too formal! Step right in, join in, let yourself be enchanted!” Kurt Kladler
Katrin Plavčak (b. 1970 in Gütersloh, lives in Berlin and Vienna); numerous solo and group exhibitions, including 2022 “What Happened in the Digital Hood”, Kunstverein Heilbronn; 2021 “Alien Nation”, Semperdepot Vienna; 2020 mural (2.5 x 55 m) for the Nye Jordal Amfi ice hockey stadium, Oslo; 2020 “A Hairy Line”, Kunstverein Eisenstadt, together with Kata Tranker; 2019 “Haus der Lose / House of Lots”, Stanley Picker Gallery & Visconti Studio (Kinky Muppet Recording Session), Kingston University, London; 2018 “On the Couch”, Schwartzsche Villa / Kommunale Galerie Steglitz-Zehlendorf, Berlin; 2016 Skulpturengarten Daniel Spoerri, Seggiano, 21er Haus Vienna; 2015 Villa Merkel Esslingen, Fondazione Cini Venice; 2014 Sammlung Essl, Klosterneuburg; 2013 Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle, KW Berlin; 2009 Secession Vienna.
Together with Nicholas Hoffman and Oliver Stotz, Katrin Plavčak plays and sings in the band KINKY MUPPET. The characterisation of their music could, transposed into the visual realm, also serve as a description of her painting: “Captain Beefheart-esque absurdity gives way to earnest reflections on everyday life as riffs, hooks and grooves mingle with searing feedback, buttery harmonies and kitschy sound effects”. Website: https://katrinplavcak.net/ Listen: soundcloud.com/kinkymuppet and https://plagdichnicht.bandcamp.com/ Watch: Instagram: kinky_muppet