Katja Flint

Eins

Schwarz-weiß-Porträts als innere Bilder menschlicher Gefühlswelten

For more than three decades, the actress Katja Flint (b. Stadthagen, 1959; lives and works in Berlin) has created roles and embodied her characters’ emotions and traits. For a change of perspective, she has now tried her hand at a different art, using photography to probe the question of what it means to be human. The black-and-white portraits recall the otherworldly expressions of the figures in Francis Bacon’s paintings or the characters in Samuel Beckett’s plays. Draining the photographic space of all light, Flint positions the sitters and her camera before an austere black backdrop and captures their movements in long exposures. The faces appear blurred and without individual features. The bodies, often dressed in shirt, tie, and jacket, have an androgynous and static air about them, as though they were exoskeletons, the scaffolds supporting a softer and more sensitive inward life. Katja Flint’s subtle yet expressive shots make for somber and arresting depictions of human existence, transporting the beholder into a cinematographic and dreamlike parallel world.

The book, with an essay by Matthias Harder and a preface by Uwe Neumann and Kerstin Wahala, presents 42 of these photographs.

Exhibitions:
January 13–February 24, 2019, 
Kunsthalle Rostock, Katja Flint – Eins
March 30–May 4, 2019, 
Galerie Semjon Contemporary Berlin, Katja Flint – Eins