At M HKA’s inbox, Caroline Coolen (Be, 1975) will be both showing recent works and launching her book Carlina Vulgaris with a whole new body of images and a text by curator and writer Tania Nasielski.
As an artist, Caroline Coolen enjoys the freedom of (re)creating the world as an Umwelt she feels is or would be her preferred environment - sensitive and sensuous as plants; instinctive and intuitive as animals; somewhat (ir)rational as mankind. Her work stands for the elements, the animals, the people(s) who are in the margin, excluded by a growingly standardised, controlled, consumeristic society. She would depict moths rather than butterflies, thistles rather than flowers, underdogs rather than horses, birch trees rather than oak trees. Echoing her consistent drive for freedom and independence, Coolen's operating modes vary with each work anew. Assembling materials in improbable associations, juxtaposing different processes, she tests the limits of that freedom, questions the codes of artistic practices while studying the way in which nature and culture might coexist. Hidden narratives are condensed in sculptural pieces, in installations and drawings. As in tales, violence and poetry co-inhabit. As in thistles, beauty and danger prickle the beholder. Caroline Coolen’s works echo vulnerability and strength with the capacity to resist as a clue to life and art. (Tania Nasielski)