FORTHCOMING... Katrin Kampmann is a Berlin-based artist whose practice includes painting, works on paper and various "itinerant stagings" of her paintings. Rob Garrett is commissioning new work from the artist for presentation in New Zealand.

On a recent visit to her studio in Berlin, Rob Garrett discussed with the artist plans for two New Zealand projects. Firstly Kampmann will be represented by two works on paper in an international group show that Rob Garrett is curating for Snake Pit project space in Auckland towards the end of 2012. Secondly, subject to receiving project funding, there is a larger, more ambitious new project which will involve bringing Kampmann and new paintings travelling to New Zealand for a new "Wanderausstellung" [Touring Exhibition] project involving a series of wilderness stagings and one or two public exhibitions.

"I was attracted to this artist for the fresh high quality of her painting as well as for the thoughtful, but also whimsical, concepts she is exploring."

The New Zealand “Wanderausstellung” project:
Kampmann's proposed New Zealand project builds upon and extends the “Die Wanderausstellung” [The Touring Exhibition] project she undertook in Berlin and the Tyrol Alps:

• Kampmann is making a series of paintings about the New Zealand landscape, that in one way explore the idea of an imaginary, exotic landscape seen from the other side of the world. In this respect she is tapping into romantic landscape and travel traditions that had quite distinctive manifestations in both Germany and New Zealand in the past two centuries.
• The artist will bring these paintings, as well as a series of German landscape paintings that she created in a similar way about the German Alps.
• In Germany, Kampmann and two assistants "took her landscapes hiking" in the Tyrol Alps. There they "staged" the works in a series of hiking cabins through the Tyrol, as well as dressing themselves in traditional Tyrolean costumes. They documented this hike and the various presentations and Kampmann also made a series of pinhole camera photographs of the actual landscapes. Both Kampmann’s documentation and new paintings reflected on the relationship between the imaginary and the real, and between site and non-site in this project.
• In NewZealand the artist, again with assistants, will take her paintings of a partly “imagined” New Zealand landscape hiking on the Volcanic Plateau (we are currently selecting the most suitable hiking track). She will document this process as well as take new pinhole photographs. All of this material will then be exhibited in a public gallery. A selection of small works from the original German hiking trip will also be shown in the Corner window project space which I curate on K Rd, Auckland.

This project has the potential to resonate well in both New Zealand and Germany because of our shared thrall for wild landscapes, the recreational outdoors, the romance of hiking; and our historically different, yet related ambivalence towards the cultural clichés that attend these affections for Nature and out outdoor traditions.