b. 1982 Knoxville TN USA
Lives and works in Tucson AZ USA
At first glance Katarina Riesing’s dyed paintings on stretched silk and colored pencil drawings betray an infatuation with laborious detail and rich material - especially in the hand-embroidered gold thread, use of silk, or the exquisitely-rendered swirls of patterned stocking, seemingly inspired by a northern Renaissance luxuriance. Yet Riesing's insistence on close croppings, and awkward, unsightly or uncomfortably erotic aspects of the body, reveal surreptitious squirming. The confrontational intimacy of such compositions is paradoxically reserved, as Riesing’s otherwise recognizable depictions leave plenty unsaid. The paintings are made with dye on either crepe de chine or raw silk, a surface both akin to skin and a symbol of delicacy, sensuality, and opulence. To witness its desecration with alarmingly realistic excavations of the body's imperfections - its moles, rashes, scars, or pimples - is at once unsettling and pleasingly subversive. Riesing's works often have a play-within-a-play quality, where other forms of imagery are wittily in focus - tattoos of bodies, negative spaces that suggest caves or sunsets, patterns that form drawing within drawings, sheer garments that create a screen or veil. Riesing's drawings are quieter than the paintings but no less powerfully precise or oddly bewitching. With influences as disparate as Christina Ramberg, Sarah Lucas, or Ghada Amer, and imagery from medical illustrations of skin disease, to prison tattoos, stock photography, and pantyhose labels, Riesing has reinvigorated our relationship to the body, with equal parts seduction and brutality.
