Karen Vermeren (°1982, Belgium) studied painting at the Sint-Lucas University College Ghent (2005). Since 2009, she has been contributing to the research platform Horizontal Drawing at St Lucas University College of Art & Design Antwerp. She showed her work in several cities in Belgium and abroad. She has done several residencies in Finland, Norway, Isola Comacina in Italy (funded by the Flemish Government) and recently at the Mayer of Munich Glass Studio in Germany.
"Karen Vermeren connects processes that, deep inside the earth, form the landscape with processes in the construction of society. The overwhelming beauty of nature stirred her interest in the geological formation of the landscape. She travels to locations above fault lines where tectonic plates clash against one another or move apart. She couples a specific landscape to a given location where she is at work. It is a representation and also an environment wherein the visitor is introduced. At the fault line between the abstract and the figurative, a special form of landscape painting art is created (...)." (Christine Vuegen)
In her current residence in the guest studio of Akureyri she is focusing on the North Atlantic Ridge. Books are used as exhibition space. Transparent pages, cut outs and doubled compositions are shaping space. They function as sequels and open up windows to the insides of the ridge and the slow process of a fault line. By turning pages the cyclic changes of the earth in time become visual. Her goal is to give the viewer different possible frames so as to make him/her aware of his/her position in relation to the landscape.
www.karenvermeren.be
