Karina Bisch’s practice rests on an experience of painting that engages with its autonomy as well as its limits; her works slip into other media (sculpture, installation, performance, drawing) as they “recycle” themselves, asserting an unusual vitality. For her degree show in 2000 at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, the paintings reworked architectural motifs into grids. From 2006, following her residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, her painting has been based on a deep and personal rereading of the historical avant-gardes of the 20th century, returning to their ideal of the fusion of art and life, notably through the decorative arts, which she strips of all pejorative connotations.

Following extensive iconographic research, painting became the artist’s means for appropriating history in the everyday. It is important for her to “materialise images, literally to make them concrete” (this quotation, like those that follow, are extracted from interviews and conversation or writings). She often starts with works by under-recogonised women artists, or less considered: a mosaic by Sonia Delaunay (1885-1979) in a swimming pool in Vitry-sur-Seine (Sonia Delaunay, 2010), for instance, or the weaving motifs of Anni Albers (1899-1994; Triangles [to Anni], 2014). K. Bisch avoids all formalism by using techniques that permit fast execution: her practice turns on the desire to “understand how it works”, notably through a double gesture of reworking and displacement.

Far from a “nostalgic or referential rereading”, the artist multiplies associations, liberates past forms from their semiotic and symbolic assignments. Simultané (2010) takes up an eponymous S. Delaunay screen installed in Jacques Heim’s boutique during the 1925 Paris International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts, only this time on wax fabric, recalling memories from K. Bisch’s childhood in Africa; on the other side of the screen, motifs of a Rudolf von Laban dancing figure. Large format paintings like the Tableaux vivantsdisplayed in an eponymous 2017 exhibition at L’Onde, in Vélizy-Villacoublay, or her recent Tableaux de tissuscombine and recombine modernist motifs in ever-new ways.

“Always as painter”, K. Bisch has orchestrated a variety of performances, whether part of an exhibition (The Question of Times, 2008), or as monumental sculpture (Kiosk, public commission in Lyon, 2013). Some were brought together in the group exhibition Tableaux organised by Vincent Honoré at the Magasin de Grenoble in 2011. In Le Témoin (2013), a play based on choreographic and literary sources (the Ballets Russes’s Paradedirected by Serge de Diaghilev, Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun, etc.) she asserts the spectator as actor in history, distancing them from their long-associated passivity. In a similar jettisoning of hierarchies, the exhibition space may be transformed into a stage through robes and tunics worn by models, as seen in the exhibition Arlequine in the Galerie des Galeries at Galeries Lafayette, Paris in 2015. It is through the decorative that art may “help us live” in all senses of the word, as demonstrated by K. Bisch in her project PAINTING FOR LIVING (from 2012), where she created silk scarves, dresses, bags and T-shirts, described as “peintures-à-porter”, paintings-to-wear. Elsewhere, she designed the interior and exterior of the Amourspéniche, available to rent by the night in association with Le Voyage à Nantes since 2019. Along with the artist Nicolas Chardon (b. 1974), between 2005 and 2011 she staged a series of exhibitions and works titled There Is a Love Affair Between the White Cube and the Black Square, and since 2017 has codirected the editorial and curatorial platform CONNOISSEURS (connoisseurs.fr).