Kinke Kooi at Feature

Beautiful drawings for a cold, winter day

The Arnhem, Netherlands artist's show is up through 12/22

When I saw her 2009 show it blew me away. But she's been showing with Feature since the 1990s.
There is a good interview on Feature's website: Interview with Kinke Kooi and Mirjam Westen

From the interview, "I derive pleasure from knitting everything together, so to speak—from being close to the paper while I’m drawing. Actually, all I do is comb hair and string beads. It’s a meditative way of working. I’m also always looking for an excuse to draw things I can’t seem to leave alone, like little balls. They represent things I’m attracted to: jewellery, beads and berries. I have a kind of primeval instinct to physically unite with things as I’m gathering them. It’s a form of clinging to things and drawing them towards me, a kind of eroticism and fertility… That’s why the rubbing and polishing of circles and spheres is important to me: I can almost feel the visual smoothness tingling in my fingertips. Somehow it gives me physical satisfaction: my eyes see what my hands want to feel." - Kinke Kooi

She also says, "I come to rest in the holes of shame, as it were. I live in them for a while, I explore them. They’re no-man’s-lands. Because occupying them is so unpopular, no one wants to be there. The top is all about incisiveness and being squeezed together. Being in a high place enables you to survey things and create distance. I have difficulty with this detachment. I want, above all, to be close, to be intimate."

"My greatest wish was to one day have a low, sunken sitting area, or a couch made of the same material as the wallpaper. My eyes long to see something that fades into something else. I never bought anything like that because I was afraid it would make a frumpy impression. It also seemed a wonderful idea to use a stencil to decorate the edges of every window or door opening. The fact that I was frightened others would find it frumpy says something about the general disapproval of the decorative, the feminine. I have a large drawer full of lace pieces that I hold against new clothes to see how it looks. Still, I never sew them on, because it’s not cool. The arbiters of good taste shun decorated edges, because that suggests obedience." (As Hudson said, "a goddess.")

"I sometimes compare my way of working to water. Water has no form in itself but adapts itself to any other form. It always runs to the lowest point, fills even the smallest hole without missing a single one. So from that perspective, my drawing behavior is a perfect form of adaptation, because there’s nothing I like better than filling up the space in between things. This enables me to touch everything, and it gives me the feeling of being in contact. It also evokes something electrifying and lustful as soon as everything is touching everything else."

Smaller, collage works shown together in a Salon-style hanging

Including photos that have been treated by the artist

On left, reproduced Indian miniature with the scale of figures altered.

A beautiful show.