1968 born in Rotenburg/W.
1989-95 Studied fine arts, department of free painting, master class with Prof. K.-H. Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin (HdK)
1996/97 Collaboration in the Heiner Bastian Fine Arts office
1997-1999 Studio in Berlin
2000-2014 Studio in Hamburg, Erdmannstrasse & Dosenfabrik
since 2017 Studio in Tostedt, Am Dillsbach & Himmelsweg
Annette Karweck is a versatile visual artist. Her emotionally charged, large-format oil paintings transport us into a colorful and surreal world that consists of a combination of dream and reality. Bold colors and distorted shapes create a universe in which familiar motifs - such as houses, landscapes and people - are mixed with fantastic elements. The rotatability of the pictures offers the viewer multiple perspectives. The skies glow in vivid yellow-orange or clear blue tones and seem to merge with the earth, blurring the horizon and dissolving the perspectives.
The artist experiments with intense colors, image quotations and her own photographs, which are collaged into the painted large formats and then painted on. Karweck began developing the large-format series of “Rotables”, the rotating paintings, which were originally directly linked to quotations from “old painting”, while she was still studying for her Master's degree in “Free Painting” at the Berlin University of the Arts in the 1990s. They were conceived as a series of experiments in dealing with landscape, human emotions and altered perspectives. The artist plays with the idea of deformation by shifting everyday objects and scenes into a surreal environment, twisting and reinterpreting them.
The details are particularly striking: from delicate textures to smaller, almost hidden elements embedded in the composition, the viewer is invited to keep discovering new layers and meanings. A cracked eggshell, floating house parts, colorful mythical creatures and an otherworldly landscape come together seamlessly to create a narrative that is both confusing and fascinating.
In the “Patterns and politics” series, parts of various wallpaper and bed linen patterns from the artist's childhood in the 1970s are juxtaposed with excerpts from photographs from war zones, such as an aerial view of the burning and smoky city of Baghdad during the night of the first attack in the Iraq war. In this way, the banal and beautiful are interwoven with themes such as threat and devastation, thus also referring to inner states of human feeling.
In her latest project, the artist uses very fleeting charcoal drawings on torn shopping bags and ceramic sculptures to examine the phenomena of depression and its effects in relationships. This is contrasted with the “Flowers of acquittal”, which are intended to break the gloom with their radiant colors.
