Karina Bisch. Elle peint.

This is what is shown and analyzed by the book KARINA BISCH. ELLE PEINT., through Joana Neves’s long interview with the artist and through the veritable graphic essay by Experimental Jetset , who practically turn a book of paintings into a painted book.

For around fifteen years, Karina Bisch has been developing work—mainly painting—that places modernist heritage and its present or imagined uses in perspective within the world of contemporary forms. In her work, painting mistrusts mediums and specificity, and it very often conspires to mix genres, eras and standards. Beyond formats and categories, everything stems from her mission to revive a certain avant-garde spirit and breathe new life into the relationship between fine arts and visual arts.

KARINA BISCH. ELLE PEINT. is the fourth monograph on Karina Bisch’s work, after “KB” in 2003, “Karina Bisch” in 2005 and “Karina Bisch. Album” in 2008. The new book more precisely analyses her painting practice. It shows how the artist developed a wholly original pictoriality, extending well beyond the frames of paintings in order conquer the spaces of performance, theatre, ordinary objects, clothing—in short, the space of life. The 152-page book includes numerous reproductions of the artist’s works and images of her striking exhibitions. Although the 16 x 18 cm format is inspired by SKIRA’S famous 1950s collection “Le Goût de notre temps”, the book’s design offers a radically contemporary approach, resulting from a complicit, sustained exchange between Karina Bisch and the graphic designers from Amsterdam. Like the format, the fabric hardcover binding evokes modern art books, as well as black-and-white photographic reproductions. Yet the book KARINA BISCH. ELLE PEINT. is entirely in color, as if by giving up the illusion of representation, the color of the reproductions had completely invaded the book itself. As Experimental Jetset’s Marieke Stolk wrote in our exchanges: “For the reproductions of photos, we took inspiration from a few old books that use black-and-white photography in combination with audacious chromatic fields. These bold chromatic fields have to be printed in pure, solid (non-raster) PMS / Pantone colors (these inks are known as “spot colors”). Throughout the book, the system of colored fields almost forms a language, or a phrase, or a code. The book’s colors will thus be concrete colors—not “fake” reproduction colors, but the “real” colors of real printed inks.”

One single taste and one single reality guide Karina Bisch’s answers to Joana Neves in the long interview they conducted over the past two years. Evoking forms of modernism that have become appropriable, the artist sets out something that almost sounds like a program, if not a project, which can be seen at work in the book KARINA BISCH. ELLE PEINT.: “I must give [these forms] a new body. I think it’s through this process of embodiment in reality that these forms can once again prove to be effective, operative.”

Published by Connoisseurs

Graphic design: Experimental Jetset

Printed by: Tienkamp

Interview: Joana Neves

Text editing: Alessandra Bellavita, Nicolas Chardon

Translation: David Malek

152 pages.

Format: 160 x 180 mm.

1000 copies

Collector: 30 original collages, signed and numbered

ISBN: 978-2-490191-00-0

Karina Bisch, Adagp, 2017

Publication produced with support from:

Centre national des arts plastiques (support for the printed publication)

Fondation d’entreprise Ricard

Micro Onde, centre d’art de L’Onde, Vélizy-Villacoublay

Le Quadrilatère – Ville de Beauvais

Palette Terre, Paris