Aftertime

Katja Strunz's installations, sculptures, and works on paper grasp and reflect temporal and spatial resonances and historical references, and thus create a kind of 'after-effect' with echoes of the past in the present. Typical for Katja Strunz's work is the folding of materials: she plays with the act of covering and uncovering, of hiding and revealing. This act of producing insights through reduction and destruction reflects the assumption that the visible surface is deceptive, as well as the desire to penetrate to the interior of things, to achieve the revelation of the medium or support through the reduction to what is really important. Katja Strunz's works demonstrate that the fleeting present is steeped in an inescapable past which the artist intentionally evokes. The exhibition title Nachzeit (Aftertime), chosen by the artist, thus refers not just retrospectively to her works created in the past, but also suggests echoes of Walter Benjamin's notion of Jetztzeit – a moment which strikes the present like lightening, in which all of previous history resonates. Katja Strunz's works also reflect the past and thus, as she puts it, 'a second present of the past'. Published to accompany the exhibition Nachzeit at Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin January – February 2011. English and German.