One Fine Day, July 15 - August 26, 2005, installation view VAN HORN, Düsseldorf, Germany.

Exhibited works:

The Black Tree, 2005, wood, cardboard, wire, black gaffer tape

an unnatural beauty, 2005, ink on paper, 76 x 56 cm, in frame

Untitled (24 trees), 2005, ink on paper, 76 x 56 cm, in frame

Photo: VAN HORN/Daniela Steinfeld

Katie Holten, One Fine Day

Katie Holten is currently exploring the potentials for redefining what we understand by ‘nature’ in contemporary visual arts. She developed a unique visual language that incorporates media appropriate to the situation at hand, such as drawing, installation, temporary public artworks, sound and living plants. Research in physics, botany, architecture, and urban sociology is fundamental to her practice. She creates works that contribute to an awareness of place and environment and reflects the vulnerabilities implicit in everyday life.

Katie’s new work, which she developed especially for the Van Horn space, stems from her current Fulbright research. She has filled Van Horn with an artificial tree constructed from modest materials; cardboard, wire, tape, and paper. Two drawings, which developed from her examination of different trees, are part of the exhibition. The idea of dense vegetation, while at once drawing on contemporary anxieties about the denaturalisation of the natural world, exposes the new cult of artificial nature, and also alludes to threatening landscapes in literature and old German Folk Tales. Yet, behind the desire for the paradisical, the beautiful, and the magic of fairy-tales, the dark and the eerie are as present as the insight that Utopias are doomed to failure. On a more subtle level Katie‘s works explore the discontinuity between ideals and realities.