Kim Bartelt

Kim Bartelt trained in painting at the Parson’s School of Design but abandoned the medium in favour of using found paper in her compositions. Bartlet painstakingly pastes irregular segments of coloured and transparent sheets of paper to canvas. Her paintings are infused with a delicate energy, embodying the meditative quality of her minute collage process. The sensitivity of the semi-transparent tissue paper used emphasises this process of layering and accumulation.

‘With this medium you can’t undo anything or erase any errors, but I actually like the little accidents, folds, wrinkles and even small stains that evoke the fragility of life in general and of us humans in particular’

Collected over the years, These re-used fragments allude to their past applications in their wrinkles and folds. In her more recent works, the paper is imbued with a greater sense of conceptuality, reflecting on the nature and physical properties of painting but also as an index linking each painting to its core meanings.