Katharina Maderthaner

Düsseldorf, 1982. Based in Düsseldorf

Katharina Maderthaner’s artworks draw inspiration from bizarre everyday situations in which the false mimics the real and the copy attempts to supplant the original, oscillating between good taste and bad.
This focus triggers a need in the artist to rework her experiences through an act of synthesis and sublimation, ultimately leading to the creation of something absolutely new. Banality mirrors solemnity, the duplicate mirrors the unique article, the fake and the imitation mirror the authentic in a conflation of quotidian pastiche and hidden genius, of the masterpiece and the mass-produced, of design and disaster. The artist passes between these opposed worlds by transforming one into the other and smearing their boundaries. Maderthaner’s works thus arouse an uneasy déjà-vu in their viewer, recalling things seemingly familiar; in her installations, her images and her objects, references appear that point in turn to other references. Long genealogies of taste unfold before the observer of her art, akin to a symbolic current that draws forth objects, images, ideas and motifs, leaving a rich, heterogeneous and bizarre resonance.
Maderthaner thus opens a startling door to the new, to the perception of an unexpected beauty, “Because beauty," according to Katharina, "is not something that is in things; it is between them – and between them and us.”
She trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Richard Deacon, also becoming his assistant.
She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in public and private venues since 2008. Chief amongst them: Hallraum/Gasthof Worringer Platz, Düsseldorf; Works and Presentation by Katharina Maderthaner, Yerevan, Armenia; Deacon-Maderthaner – Museo Riso, Palermo; Très Chic – Kunstverein, Ludwigsburg (Baden-Württemberg); Grosse Kunstausstellung NRW – Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.
Public collections include Kunsthaus NRW, Kornelimünster, Aachen; Museum Kunstpalast (Glas Sammlung), Düsseldorf; Museum im Busch, Etaneno, Namibia; Gustav-Lübcke-Museum, Hamm.