Kim Bartelt is a Berlin-based painter working with surface, paper and linen. Her technique and choice of materials are unique. She skillfully interprets materials that have had another life before being reworked by using layering to give meaning to her forms and spaces.

You often work with a juxtaposition of paper and linen, how do you interpret the use of mixed materials in a two-dimensional artistic production?

With the juxtaposition of the textured surface and the flat paper I want to further underline the sensitivity of the very thin paper. The paper can be read as a synonym for skin and therefore the fragility of life and us humans in particular.

In other works the contrast is more subtle and even hardly readable, like the ones exhibited here (Riddle, Little Foot & Pitstop). They deal with the ‘in between’, with the relation between the shapes/figures and those things which are not visible...