REVIEWS
60 WRD/MIN Art Critic
Indianapolis, Indiana
Spring 2019
How do you carefully tie up events, when the events in question are those that follow the Holocaust? It is a question posed in a drawing by Karen Baldner, in which a woman and a girl work together at the impossible task of keeping history orderly. Even as they toil, it unravels. Baldner is no newcomer to this state of affairs: she grew up in West Germany, born into a Jewish family who survived the Nazi regime. Nothing is straightforward after that, and the impetus to give shape to its tangles informs many of her artistic productions, foremost among them a series of engrossing and unsettling artist books. The most unexpected of these is "German/Jew" from 2003, a three-dimensional head-shaped book, molded on the artist's own, in which tufts of blonde hair bind together the infinitely split self of that nearly obliterated creature: the titular German Jew. Before Hitler, it was possible for that self to be whole; in wartime it was continually cleaved, literally and figuratively. The work of those who survived including Baldner herself, is to figure out if they can put it back together again.
Lori Waxman
Nuvo
April 2019
Echoes of Loss, Artistic Responses to Trauma
Coconino Center for the Arts
Flagstaff, Arizona
Spring 2018
“For each piece of this cycle I have forged a particular paper surface corresponding to the stress, torment, or healing the image proposes, be it stretched to its limits or fragile through its many perforations.”
In Karen Baldner’s drawing My Private Heart Throb, a figure is set against a black background, white chalk outlining the shape of a woman, and red and white lines racing through her body and extending into her limbs. With her head turned to the side, one hand holds her breast, and the other touches protectively the lower abdomen. A seemingly pulsating heart nourishes the body with blood and life, but the overall mood is somber. A sense of dread, sadness, and vulnerability exudes from the drawing.
Baldner frequently transforms personal and familial experiences of trauma into works of art, utilizing handmade paper in her preferred medium of printmaking and bookmaking. The texture of handmade paper resembles human skin, the spine of a book mimics human anatomy, the use of hair (sometimes her own) evokes intimacy and revulsion. In the collaborative Jewish/German Dialogue Project mentioned above, she worked through her double identity as German and Jew against a backdrop of persecution. In Privacy Skinned/Boned and My Private Heart Throb, she expresses another source of violation: her female body.
Whereas The Jewish/German Dialogue Project dealt with an assault on the communal body mediated through memory, the drawings in her series Privacy attest to her survival from direct physical assault – not shielded by layers of discourse. “My focus here”, Baldner writes, “is on the actual act of survival from assault – an assault which reached down to the bones, the heart, the vital system – but which ultimately did not destroy the core of life itself.”
The female body in her drawings is, not-literally, a self-portrait, conveying the radical vulnerability of the self when left shattered and fragmented. Susan Brison, who survived a violent sexual assault, writes in her philosophical reckoning Aftermath: “Because the trauma is, to most people, inconceivable, it’s also unspeakable”. Worse, though, Bison continues, is the experience of people refusing to listen when trying to describe her ordeal. “Each time someone failed to respond it felt as though I were alone again in the ravine, dying, screaming.” Baldner’s drawings similarly plead for a response. Her drawings become testimonial objects, invested with the emotions of deep contradictory impulses: shattering of self/recovery of self. When wounds fail to transmit that story, our visceral reactions reveal our response-ability. We need to see and absorb in order to be able to”listen”.
Tara Cohn & Bjorn Krondorfer, curators
catalogue to the exhibit
Flagstaff, April 2018
Voila Nominee: Excellence in the Visual Arts 2015
NAU Art Museum: Wounded Landscapes
Wounded Landscapes: Post-Holocaust Drawings, Artists’ Books, and Paintings was on display at the NAU Art Museum, Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, from March 11 to April 26, 2014. This exhibition truly embodied the cultural, political, social, and personal consequences that affected survivors of the Holocaust and their children, the second-generation. The work of each artist explored questions that linger in the lives of Jewish people and other social groups who witnessed this tragedy and its aftermath – while presenting each individual’s perspective on how to deal with the grief and anger of this tragic history.
Arie Galles’ charcoal drawings not only exemplify his technical abilities, but also bring out the importance of the larger historical consequences of the Holocaust. He based his drawings on aerial photographs of Nazi concentration camps taken by military surveillance at the time, and it shows them still in operation. Even though his drawings are entirely black and white, ashes and scars on the landscapes can be identified by viewers form a distance. During his talk, Arie explained how these drawings are a way to try to understand the experiences of his people and learn how to cope with its memory. He made it clear that his work also helped him to distance himself from the immediate impact of this history in order to keep emotionally stable. His family had fled Poland during the Nazi occupation and survived, but they all remained deeply affected by the losses.
Karen Baldner’s work explores the same themes but in a different manner. Her work is largely done with handmade paper, hair, and bookmaking techniques. She approaches this subject matter as scars that are both personal and cultural and that transcend any national boundaries. Karen’s choice of materials resemble and evoke human skin, conveying a sense of wounding but also of healing over time. Her use of hair woven into the fabric of paperwork can create a sense of revolt in the viewer, especially since hair is usually thought of as a cultural form of beauty. Karen uses her work to create dialogue on how the Holocaust still affects people today. This is true for survivors and their descendants, but also for other people. “Wounded Landscapes” reminds us that the pain of traumatic histories can linger on for long after violent events occurred.
Amazingly, the artists Arie and Karen did not meet in person until the day of the reception at NAU. The NAU Art Museum and the Martin-Springer Institute presented their works in such a way that they entered into a conversation with each other. The accompanying interviews, lectures, and collaboration between the museum, the artists, and the Martin-Springer Institute made this project a remarkable contribution to post-Holocaust art and history, while signaling some hope for the future.
Flagstaff Arts Council
Coconino Center for the Arts
View also:
Lisa Martino, NAU-TV, Wounded Landscapes, Art Museum, Northern Arizona University, 2014: http://nau-tv.com/Play/1847/
Life in Technicolor neutrals
Baldner's large charcoal images on handmade paper are darkly humorous. Here, the Dark Ages meet the Simpsons - except that her characters are decidedly not cartoons. They may be
caricatures - "Big Daddy Joe" is the angry man at Wal-Mart who thinks you cut him off in the parking lot; "Norma-Jean Doe" is his wife, and she's pissed off, too. Angry is angry when we feel disconnected, when enough isn't enough. "Buddha....with His Hand in the Cookie Jar" is your neighbor with the beer gut and the sleeveless T-shirt yelling at his dog in the backyard. Baldner depicts him sitting Buddha-like, blissfully corpulent, grinning wryly in a sideways glance. And finally "Triptych with Child", a woman cradles her dog like the Madonna and Child in the center panel; her set is adorned with lilies and gargoyles. She is flanked by a working-class man looking befuddled while holding his baby daughter, and a more studious figure holding a cherubic boy on his knee while perusing pen and paper on the other. Here, in the ordinariness of life, is where we find meaning, or not; Baldner may be suggesting we have lost our connection with what's meaningful, or she is simply pointing our what is.
Karen Baldner: Drawings from the Heartland, are on view at the Indianapolis Art Center, 820 E.67 St, 255-2464, until April 28
Julie Pratt-McQuiston
caricatures - "Big Daddy Joe" is the angry man at Wal-Mart who thinks you cut him off in the parking lot; "Norma-Jean Doe" is his wife, and she's pissed off, too. Angry is angry when we feel disconnected, when enough isn't enough. "Buddha....with His Hand in the Cookie Jar" is your neighbor with the beer gut and the sleeveless T-shirt yelling at his dog in the backyard. Baldner depicts him sitting Buddha-like, blissfully corpulent, grinning wryly in a sideways glance. And finally "Triptych with Child", a woman cradles her dog like the Madonna and Child in the center panel; her set is adorned with lilies and gargoyles. She is flanked by a working-class man looking befuddled while holding his baby daughter, and a more studious figure holding a cherubic boy on his knee while perusing pen and paper on the other. Here, in the ordinariness of life, is where we find meaning, or not; Baldner may be suggesting we have lost our connection with what's meaningful, or she is simply pointing our what is.
Karen Baldner: Drawings from the Heartland, are on view at the Indianapolis Art Center, 820 E.67 St, 255-2464, until April 28
Julie Pratt-McQuiston
My Private Heart Beat
"Heartland & Heimaten"
Karen Baldner in the German-American Institute in Heidelberg
It can't be easy to be the [great]granddaughter of the legendary publisher Samuel Fischer, when you have been born in the US, grown up in Frankfurt, Cologne, and Munich, have attended the Art Academy of the Bavarian capital, and then have left Germany for 18 long years.
Karen Baldner has now returned to Germany with an abundance of large format charcoal drawings and two collaborative installations (created with Björn Krondorfer) made of plexi glass, printed transparencies and photo transfers. Her work places a large question mark into the air: Is my home also my "heartland"?
The two charcoal drawings on handmade paper "My Private Heart Throb" and "Picking My Own Private Brain", that are currently displayed in the German-American Institute in Heidelberg, show an anatomical view of the female body in which nerves and veins are visible. One gets the sense of seeing Frieda Kahlos suffering in the making and not in a physical but rather in a spiritual sense. It is obvious heart and brain both inflict pain on the body. The peacock feather embedded in each image that works itself up the spinal cord turns out to be a vanitas symbol. There is nothing to heal and there are no answers.
Opposite this set of images we see two smaller drawings depicting an American trailer home surrounded by used and useless objects. Framed like old colorful decals they render evidence of a newly experienced abyss between the employed and those who have to reinvent life anew on a daily basis. Their poverty is real and their mobility proves to be an illusion. Is this the "Heartland" one can dream of? Hopeless situations, traumas (such as the expulsions from the East, the Jews and reverberations of concentration camps), continuous suffering at the hand of a chosen home: there are no answers. Karen Baldner (born 1952) knows this. And she asks how to define [these] two worn out concepts especially when one of them is in the plural.
Milan Chlumsky
(translation KB}
Rhein-Neckar Zeitung
November 2, 2004
Karen Baldner in the German-American Institute in Heidelberg
It can't be easy to be the [great]granddaughter of the legendary publisher Samuel Fischer, when you have been born in the US, grown up in Frankfurt, Cologne, and Munich, have attended the Art Academy of the Bavarian capital, and then have left Germany for 18 long years.
Karen Baldner has now returned to Germany with an abundance of large format charcoal drawings and two collaborative installations (created with Björn Krondorfer) made of plexi glass, printed transparencies and photo transfers. Her work places a large question mark into the air: Is my home also my "heartland"?
The two charcoal drawings on handmade paper "My Private Heart Throb" and "Picking My Own Private Brain", that are currently displayed in the German-American Institute in Heidelberg, show an anatomical view of the female body in which nerves and veins are visible. One gets the sense of seeing Frieda Kahlos suffering in the making and not in a physical but rather in a spiritual sense. It is obvious heart and brain both inflict pain on the body. The peacock feather embedded in each image that works itself up the spinal cord turns out to be a vanitas symbol. There is nothing to heal and there are no answers.
Opposite this set of images we see two smaller drawings depicting an American trailer home surrounded by used and useless objects. Framed like old colorful decals they render evidence of a newly experienced abyss between the employed and those who have to reinvent life anew on a daily basis. Their poverty is real and their mobility proves to be an illusion. Is this the "Heartland" one can dream of? Hopeless situations, traumas (such as the expulsions from the East, the Jews and reverberations of concentration camps), continuous suffering at the hand of a chosen home: there are no answers. Karen Baldner (born 1952) knows this. And she asks how to define [these] two worn out concepts especially when one of them is in the plural.
Milan Chlumsky
(translation KB}
Rhein-Neckar Zeitung
November 2, 2004
Powerful Art Arises from Trauma
Paper Press Gallery
1017 W.Jackson Blvd
Chicago, IL
Walking into Karen Baldner's show at Paper Press Gallery is a little like accidentally overhearing some hushed and terrible confession. The pencil drawings on handmade paper clearly refer to some personal atrocity, and the artist's statement that accompanies this intimate but powerful little show confirms that impression.
"Two years ago I was raped and almost killed", she begins. The experience has left me emotionally and spiritually shattered. Yet I have begun to pick up the pieces of my life again. With the help of my work and its reverberations I am finding the grace of a new life with a strength and solidity amazing to me."
Baldner goes on to speak of "terror, disgust and hopelessness," and as powerful as this account is, it does not speak any louder than the work itself.
Entitled "Privacy", the image cycle confronts subjects and emotions which, while very common, are seldom addressed so frankly in art or in conversation.
Even the paper, which Baldner makes herself, is stretchy, skin-colored and sensuous to the touch, a reminder of flesh and its frailties. In some drawings Baldner has embedded feathers, string and other materials. Always the effect of introducing this foreign matter is that it seems to further violate the nude figure beneath it. Here strings and sticks and feathers are irritants, intruders.
Baldner's courage in presenting this body of work and going public with her experience is admirable. Although she began making the drawings as a personal process of catharsis, she discovered that others were open to their emotional content. She now hopes to use the work to encourage understanding and communication about this difficult subject.
The strange thing about these drawings is that many of these figures are touchingly beautiful despite their terrible context. The delicacy of the pencil marks, the flimsiness of the paper, the tentative way the graphite almost seems about to fall from the paper in a soft dust and leave nothing behind but a smudge...these are haunting metaphors for the spirit in the bodies she draws.
For the bodies she draws are faceless; they have no identities with which to protect themselves. The recurring image is the female nude, always fragmented, invaded, broken and torn. The drawings are rendered on flax paper, a surface as fragile and flexible as the human subjects she represents. In many cases the paper is torn across the figure and pinned to the wall in fragments, a presentation that underscores the sense of vulnerability of the naked physical body.
"Privacy" is a disturbing show. Even its presentation, in a tight, intimate space, makes the impact of the work impossible to avoid. Once inside the gallery, the viewer is forced to come closer to the work and, by association, to the experience of the artist. There are no frames on these drawings, and there's no glass between them and the viewer; they are dangerously close.
Not for the fainthearted, Baldner's work is grim but lovely as well, maybe because it is about survival as well as about suffering.
Margaret Hawkins
Chicago Sun Times
April 3, 1992
1017 W.Jackson Blvd
Chicago, IL
Walking into Karen Baldner's show at Paper Press Gallery is a little like accidentally overhearing some hushed and terrible confession. The pencil drawings on handmade paper clearly refer to some personal atrocity, and the artist's statement that accompanies this intimate but powerful little show confirms that impression.
"Two years ago I was raped and almost killed", she begins. The experience has left me emotionally and spiritually shattered. Yet I have begun to pick up the pieces of my life again. With the help of my work and its reverberations I am finding the grace of a new life with a strength and solidity amazing to me."
Baldner goes on to speak of "terror, disgust and hopelessness," and as powerful as this account is, it does not speak any louder than the work itself.
Entitled "Privacy", the image cycle confronts subjects and emotions which, while very common, are seldom addressed so frankly in art or in conversation.
Even the paper, which Baldner makes herself, is stretchy, skin-colored and sensuous to the touch, a reminder of flesh and its frailties. In some drawings Baldner has embedded feathers, string and other materials. Always the effect of introducing this foreign matter is that it seems to further violate the nude figure beneath it. Here strings and sticks and feathers are irritants, intruders.
Baldner's courage in presenting this body of work and going public with her experience is admirable. Although she began making the drawings as a personal process of catharsis, she discovered that others were open to their emotional content. She now hopes to use the work to encourage understanding and communication about this difficult subject.
The strange thing about these drawings is that many of these figures are touchingly beautiful despite their terrible context. The delicacy of the pencil marks, the flimsiness of the paper, the tentative way the graphite almost seems about to fall from the paper in a soft dust and leave nothing behind but a smudge...these are haunting metaphors for the spirit in the bodies she draws.
For the bodies she draws are faceless; they have no identities with which to protect themselves. The recurring image is the female nude, always fragmented, invaded, broken and torn. The drawings are rendered on flax paper, a surface as fragile and flexible as the human subjects she represents. In many cases the paper is torn across the figure and pinned to the wall in fragments, a presentation that underscores the sense of vulnerability of the naked physical body.
"Privacy" is a disturbing show. Even its presentation, in a tight, intimate space, makes the impact of the work impossible to avoid. Once inside the gallery, the viewer is forced to come closer to the work and, by association, to the experience of the artist. There are no frames on these drawings, and there's no glass between them and the viewer; they are dangerously close.
Not for the fainthearted, Baldner's work is grim but lovely as well, maybe because it is about survival as well as about suffering.
Margaret Hawkins
Chicago Sun Times
April 3, 1992
Sense of Self
SPACES
Cleveland, OH
September 11- October 18
....Even without the knowledge that Karen Baldner survived a near fatal rape and is now in the process of assembling a fractured self in the form of drawings, her work exudes an immense trauma. In all of these works the female body is nude, usually headless, contorted in defeat. In several of them the body is even slashed, ripped asunder in two or more pieces. The handmade flax paper she uses is mutilated, erased almost to shreds, stretched and pulled and wrinkled as skin. Flay is the word that comes to mind.
Privacy is the issue here, as her title suggests: Privacy Skinned/Boned, Privacy Quartered/Riveted, and others. She depicts the body as a house entered and brutalized without showing how. All we see is the results of violation - a depersonalization of the body, the body scraped raw, practically wearing its nerves on the outside. In the three-dimensional Privacy Quartered/Riveted, four drawings hang at right angles to each other. The body is rent up the middle and punctured with rivets, waiting perhaps for sutures? Something to thread the fractured self back together. These drawings in all their distress are quite beautiful.....
Excerpt
Amy Sparks
Dialogue
November/December 1992
Cleveland, OH
September 11- October 18
....Even without the knowledge that Karen Baldner survived a near fatal rape and is now in the process of assembling a fractured self in the form of drawings, her work exudes an immense trauma. In all of these works the female body is nude, usually headless, contorted in defeat. In several of them the body is even slashed, ripped asunder in two or more pieces. The handmade flax paper she uses is mutilated, erased almost to shreds, stretched and pulled and wrinkled as skin. Flay is the word that comes to mind.
Privacy is the issue here, as her title suggests: Privacy Skinned/Boned, Privacy Quartered/Riveted, and others. She depicts the body as a house entered and brutalized without showing how. All we see is the results of violation - a depersonalization of the body, the body scraped raw, practically wearing its nerves on the outside. In the three-dimensional Privacy Quartered/Riveted, four drawings hang at right angles to each other. The body is rent up the middle and punctured with rivets, waiting perhaps for sutures? Something to thread the fractured self back together. These drawings in all their distress are quite beautiful.....
Excerpt
Amy Sparks
Dialogue
November/December 1992
Art Show Captures essence of Women
"Sense of Self"
SPACES
Cleveland, OH
....In an about-face, sharp enough to take your breath away, is the work of Karen Baldner, a series that is the product of her struggle to survive after a near fatal rape. She works on paper, so soft, pulpy and textured that it resembles flesh. On it she has drawn in muted charcoal the contours of the female torso, torn, frayed,, tattered or shredded between the thighs or breasts. Few have heads, let alone faces. It left me cringing at our fragility.The titles are equally chilling: Privacy Skinned/Boned, Privacy Quartered/Riveted.
But what also comes through is female strength. "I have experienced a sense of triumph over my fate" writes Baldner of the process of completing these pieces....
Exerpt from
"Show Captures Essence of Women"
Eleanor Mallet
The Plain Dealer
September 29, 1992
Sense of Self
SPACES
2220 Superior Viaduct
Cleveland, OH
I have often been troubled by a duality in art by women which focuses on the body. Such work frequently seems to invite, rather than challenge or counter, the ubiquitous male gaze. "Sense of Self" provides proof that issues of the body can be addressed by women clearly and powerfully without bringing this duality into play. Curated by SPACES assistant director Julie Fehrenbach, the exhibition presented work by Karen Baldner, LouAnne Greenwald, Sarah Schuster, and Deborah Small.
Most evocative were Karen Baldner's ghostly drawings of a female torso on thin, crackly, torn handmade paper. A sense of devastation emanates from these images. In the large (5' x 3') No Privacy, a highly foreshortened figure pulls away from us, hand shielding face either from a blow or from our view. Feathered Privacy features a torso, arms, and legs spread into an "X", filling the small page. Baldner's battery of the work's ground material (the stretched fibers of the fragile paper, a phallic outline torn down the center of the work) juxtaposed to the gentleness of her imagery (a feather deviously enters the figure's genitalia) highlighting the tremendous tension found in these pieces that informs their overall effect...
Excerpt
Wayne Draznin
New Art Examiner
February 1993
2220 Superior Viaduct
Cleveland, OH
I have often been troubled by a duality in art by women which focuses on the body. Such work frequently seems to invite, rather than challenge or counter, the ubiquitous male gaze. "Sense of Self" provides proof that issues of the body can be addressed by women clearly and powerfully without bringing this duality into play. Curated by SPACES assistant director Julie Fehrenbach, the exhibition presented work by Karen Baldner, LouAnne Greenwald, Sarah Schuster, and Deborah Small.
Most evocative were Karen Baldner's ghostly drawings of a female torso on thin, crackly, torn handmade paper. A sense of devastation emanates from these images. In the large (5' x 3') No Privacy, a highly foreshortened figure pulls away from us, hand shielding face either from a blow or from our view. Feathered Privacy features a torso, arms, and legs spread into an "X", filling the small page. Baldner's battery of the work's ground material (the stretched fibers of the fragile paper, a phallic outline torn down the center of the work) juxtaposed to the gentleness of her imagery (a feather deviously enters the figure's genitalia) highlighting the tremendous tension found in these pieces that informs their overall effect...
Excerpt
Wayne Draznin
New Art Examiner
February 1993
Catalogue to "Sense of Self"
The struggling bodies in Karen Baldner's Privacy series reflect her internal struggle for survival. They arose from the physical, emotional and spiritual pain that followed a nearly fatal rape. They rise out of the pain, confront it, and begin to reclaim the body and the person that was violently lost.
In a meaningful synthesis of materials, starkly drawn nude figures emerge from smudged, soft charcoal backgrounds. Paper, hand-formed from flax pulp, is flesh-colored, unevenly textured and imperfect, eerily close to human skin. With frayed edges and sections in tatters, the fragility but enduring strength of the flax, the skin and the woman beneath it are exposed.
While none of Baldner's torn and split faceless torsos are soon forgotten, Privacy Skinned/Boned is perhaps the most haunting. By offering up her skin she retains her psyche and her sanity. Though the exterior is shredded, the unseen interior is intact and hopeful.
Julie Fehrenbach, Curator
SPACES
Cleveland, OH
2002
Stations OFF the Cross
Artemesia Gallery
700 N.Carpenter St
Chicago, IL
Karen Baldner uses the tactile surface of handmade paper to achieve different modes of sensuality in this installation of nine charcoal drawings. The drawings of two religious archetypes investigate the relationship between male sexuality and spirituality while emphasizing the sensual beauty of the male nude. Such an emphasis serves not just to heighten the reality of the flesh: it also shows the male body as an object of feminine desire. through this unconventional twist in perspective, Baldner re-explores the traditional duality of "passion" as historically embodied in male desire.
In "Stations OFF the Cross" the primitive, instinctual level dominates. Each 60- by 70-inch panel in this series of eight shows a muscular, well-proportioned nude writhing on the cross. A Baroque atmosphere of light and dark obscures the face diminishing the individual's presence of mind and highlights sexuality by illuminating the uncovered genitals. While spotlighting the male organ stresses carnal urgency, twisted torsos and limbs convey the torment of physical desire disassociated from intellect.
The crushed, battered, and punctured surface of the paper underscores the brutal suffering of the figures in the series. Hung together like stretched hides in a sacred temenos, each panel contains a figure trapped in some primitive ritual of of sacrifice. Though the exposed penis suggests sexuality, the sensate quality of the work derives predominantly from the texture of the paper, not from the representation of tactile qualities through drawing.
Baldner's drawing is more successful in Buddha Taking a Break, where the application of velvety charcoal on pressed paper creates the effect of smooth, touchable skin. Buddha, who sits peacefully contemplating a small plant, exudes overall harmony through his soft facial expression and the curving lines of his torso, limbs, and phallus. Here sexuality seems an integrated life force, the spirit that pervades all nature. In these works, the expression of heroic struggle or peaceful resolution resonates so powerful with the religious icons from which they are drawn that, in the end,they transcend the specifics of gender to become metaphors of the condition of human existence.
Dana Felder
New Art Examiner
November 1992