Born in Berlin, Kim Bartelt trained in Fine Art at Parsons School of Design, New York. After painting sets for commercial campaigns, she began to collect the discarded sheets of paper used in the set designs. She slowly began incorporating them into her art practice, making impossibly light, minimal collages that, through their delicate translucence, appeared to transcend their own materiality.
Drawing on the language of geometric abstraction, Bartelt’s work mediates on the ephemerality of our world and the hidden connections of contemporary human experience. Her use of a consciously restrained visual vocabulary, consisting of squares and rectangles, harnesses complex emotional states into seemingly controlled, harmonious compositions. Creating canvases that may at first appear solitary and silent, through contemplative engagement, reveal a pulsing inner landscape that captures the often fragile connection between the seen and the unseen, the permanent and transient.
There is an inherent dichotomy in her work as it strives for a sense of compositional order and stability, whilst being filtered through the intensely personalised dominion of their creator. In recent years, Bartelt’s explorations of space and volume have continued into large-scale sculptural works – megalithic-feeling structures that are often made of deceptive, light-weight packing material.