Working with a wide range of materials from paper to perspex, argon to clay, Karin Lijnes’s latest exhibition continues her examination into formation and representation of female identity within a rampant consumer culture.  

Working with popular imagery present in the consumer-driven world around us, from the hyper-idealised standards of cosmetic advertising to aspirational lifestyle images of luxury brands, Lijnes’s paper assemblages decontextualise familiar objects and layer them into new and strange scenes.

“Commodities and data articulate into noise, flat repetitions, eternal truths at faster rates than human subjects”

At the core of her work, Lijnes opens up the dialogue as around what is seen as the "appropriate" feminine identity for woman assimilated into a patriarchal culture and re-contextualise these visual markers into new forms that question the idea of what is "appropriate".

Biography

Karin Lijnes was born in Cape Town and completed her MAFA at Unisa in 1998.

She was the recipient of a Sasol New Signatures Award in 1992 and has had work represented on numerous group exhibitions and she organized the first Land Art event on the Noordhoek Common in 2014.

Lijnes has held 5 solo exhibitions, the most recent being at Rust en Vrede Gallery in 2016.

Lijnes's article titled: ‘Dynamic Shifts - The art of the Winterveld women’ (first published in De Arte) was published in the anthology: The Face of the Spirit: illuminating a century of essays by South African women (2007) commissioned by Department of Arts and Culture. Published by Beulah Thumbadoo and Associates on behalf of the Department of Arts and Culture. Pages 183-186.