Nils Karsten: Cutting room

Pearl Lam Galleries presents Cutting Room, Nils Karsten’s first solo exhibition in Asia. 

The Brooklyn-based, Hamburg-born artist will exhibit over 40 collage on paper works, with some incorporating pencil and others graphite or graphite and acrylic, which he has created over the past four years. 

Karsten “thinks” in collages. He meticulously cuts out images from various sources, such as magazines, flyers, newspapers, books, personal photographs, and propaganda material, and then either arranges the disparate images on paper to create surreal scenes in his graphite collages or places associative images together in a grid he has drawn on paper. 

In both instances, Karsten’s goal is to “own all images”. The images become the artist’s through the laborious and meditative process of cutting, the act of which is a ritual for Karsten. 

He is particularly drawn to historic figures, soldiers, tanks, airplanes, tools, teeth, bones, nails, and cigarettes in all shapes and colours. 

In creating his graphite collages, Karsten usually studies hundreds of pre-cut paper pieces, playing with them, moving them around, and creating relationships between them. This process can take weeks, sometimes months, or even years. 

Karsten calls this organisational process “the act of playing out a story or creating poetry”, as it is beyond intuition and knowledge. 

The works often make themselves. Karsten arranges and glues the found print media onto a rarefied graphite landscape, which he says “is best understood as an indeterminate mental space—an unencumbered field of consciousness— where these images exist.” This space is full of playful moments and contradictions, often with a quiet social-political undercurrent, although the artist does not intend for his works to be political messages. 

Strongly influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism, the artist is fascinated by machinery, especially war machinery such as tanks, submarines, planes, etc, which often appear in his collages. 

Pearl Lam, founder of Pearl Lam Galleries says, “I have long been an admirer of Nils Karsten’s artistic portfolio, having first introduced his work to Shanghai in a 2006 group exhibition. I am pleased to be holding his first solo exhibition in Asia, featuring a collection of works that reflect contemporary society with clever references to the past, in addition to a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour.”