Karin Arink
After having studied at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, Karin Arink recently completed her Master’s degree at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam. In 1992 she won the Prix de Rome in Sculpture.
Karin Arink makes sculptures and installations from various materials, including textile and ceramics. Often they are half-animal, half-human figures, reaching, folding and stretching themselves: ‘creatures’, is how the artist describes them. Arink’s sensitive work is about bodies that are either transforming, exposing or hiding themselves. By making (sometimes literal) references to a palpable form of corporeality, Arink displays the vulnerability and helplessness of man. She examines man’s capacity for manipulability, but also his incapacity and unfathomability. Her works in this exhibition also examine these topics. While ‘Hiding behind the shine’ shows an abstract disguise of her own image, the title of the work ‘Misamee’ refers to the fantasy novel ‘Everville’ (1994), written by American author Clive Barker: “Misamee? Oh, that’s a word the sailors use. It means something they find out at sea that’s not really made yet.”