Karin Hoogesteger is a fine artist. She was born in 1973 in the Dutch polder and graduated at the Academy of fine Arts in 1997. She lives in Zutphen and is currently working in the city Arnhem, Netherlands.
To illustrate the motivation behind her work, a poem by Loris Malaguzzi.
BARE , an exhibition at Jaski Art Gallery Amsterdam, november 2007. Text by Siebe Rossel.
In her latest work Karin Hoogesteger (1973) shows innocent girls recumbent, lifeless and colourless in a plane surface. Any connection with the surroundings is missing. The bare setting is confusing. It looks as if the bare existence has been put on a Petri dish for further analysis. A depiction of a dead animal, found along the road, belongs to each painting. By identifying the child and the animal Hoogesteger makes people think. Who is guilty: child or environment, man or animal?
In her other works children and animals do not raise any recognition, only questions. A child looks at you either in a probing way or looks away, the surroundings are unrealistic. What promise is hidden within a child, how does the surrounding world effect children? These are questions the artist asks herself but also as an onlooker one has got to wonder about it. By alternating between vivid colours with sparingly filled in surfaces Hoogesteger gives onlookers the space to their own story reflected in these paintings. How transient, curious and dear is each life, what choice is there, what is predestined? By adding abstract geometrical figures to the near photographic depictions she sends the questions of the onlooker into the direction of the essence of the existence, without completing it any further.
Hoogesteger does not preach, she does not heavily criticize but she asks for attention to and reflection on life of man and animal. Whoever wants to sharpen the mind does not need a sharp grinding stone however one has to want to put it into action. Hoogesteger with her mild existentialism calls on the onlooker with emphasis. Not only for the onlooker but also for the artist herself the answer is not defined. Hoogesteger experiences creating art like philosophizing with different means. It is a search to the core of existence and the question is more important than the answer. It is a penitential from the realization that somehow nobody will be able to live without a feeling of guilt. An onset of reincarnation in paint.