Berlin-based installation artist Karolin Schwab (1987, born in Stralsund, Germany) studied fine arts in Greifswald, London and Berlin with Ai Weiwei. Her works can be found in renowned public collections and museums. In 2023 she won the CeU Loves Art Award and a Neustart Kultur grant from the Stiftung Kunstfonds Bonn. She was also awarded the Young Art Award for Visual Arts in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania in 2022.
Using site specific installation and sculpture Karolin Schwab explores different ideas of how we perceive a landscape as well as the space and the relationship between the viewer and their ever-changing environment. Her works embrace the gentle processes and movement in everything, while also seeking to find a moment of stillness.
The minimalistic shapes and lines that she deliberately puts into a certain context form a kind of framework or bridge, that create a moment that allows for a connection between man and nature, between inner and outer landscape. With regards to the reoccurring circles in a lot of the installations one could also speak of lenses or magnifying glasses that make the viewer look far out in order to find a part of their inner self. Looking, noticing, sensing becomes the subject and so the subject becomes the person and his behavior.
The relationship of humans to nature is an important expression of culture and in many ways synonymous with the relationship to the ‚sacred/universal’. This can be traced back to beginning of mankind and still remains a very relevant topic especially in our digital age, where we have to ask questions about what it is that makes us human?
Wether working outdoors or indoors she aims to sensitive the viewer to what is happing around them in terms of light, wind, material, space, change of color or of perspective and that it is their story that completes the piece. The underlying narrative of the work is one that is talking about change and it is changing with every new environment and every person, that encounters it.