Zone 0
Solo show
Katarina Caserman
Tabula Rasa Gallery | Beijing
26 October – 6 December 2024
Solo show
Katarina Caserman
Tabula Rasa Gallery | Beijing
26 October – 6 December 2024
Tabula Rasa Gallery is pleased to announce that Katarina Caserman's solo exhibition Zone 0 will open on October 26 at Tabula Rasa Gallery's Beijing space, featuring the artist's latest oil paintings. The exhibition also invited writer Fiona He to write articles for the exhibition.
Katarina Caserman works primarily in the medium of oil painting, whose artistic practice is driven by searches for new ways to approach the imperceptible and the unknown. The exhibition title, Zone 0, is inspired by the “Zone” in Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 philosophical sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic. In some ways, Caserman’s practice, much like sci-fi stories’ imaginations of the surreal to reveal current realities, encourages self-discoveries and of the world around one through visual journeys on the painted canvas. Moreover, rather than pointing at any specifics that figurative paintings suggest, her choice of abstraction opens wider experiential and interpretive possibilities.
Caserman adopts an intuitive and improvisational approach to her painting practice to realize this process. She often starts with a tabula rasa on her mind, laying down patches of colors, lines, and textures that ultimately determine a work’s ensuing process. These initial marks also act as clues or cues the artist interacts with and responds to, then laboring over the canvas through multiple layers and repetitive gestures, allowing her to achieve the undetermined and unpredictable pictorial space. One would not find a specific focal point in her image. Instead, the painting animates a sense of movement that is spontaneous, coherent, and fluid, as if these undefined forms have warped into pathways, coming in and out of the canvas, crisscrossing each other, without a beginning or end. The experience of discovering such nebulous entanglements, cavernous pathways nestled in organic or contrasting colors, is ultimately the artist's analogy of exploring the atemporal and the placeless.
Zone 0 invites one to embark on these ever more precarious and hallucinatory journeys through Caserman’s works on canvas, diving deep into a labyrinth, to encounters, or even confrontations, with one’s secret desires, demons, the uncanny, and the infinite unknown.
Excerpted from Fiona He's article
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About the Artist
Katarina Caserman (b.1996, Slovenia) is a London-based artist originally from Slovenia. The challenge of representing nonmaterial matter is central to Caserman's artistic inquiry. The artist believes that for each existing object, it requires a particular type of material to facilitate its growth, and within this process, the artist seeks to give form to the intangible. She recognises that thoughts, memories, and time exist beyond the bounds of our perceptible reality, yet they remain integral components of our lives. Her work aims to materialise these abstract concepts by imbuing them with tangible characteristics such as colour, shape, and movement.
Caserman obtained her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2022) and her BA in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana (2019). She was awarded the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia’s Scholarship for Promising Young Artists (2020). Her recent solo exhibitions include: Zone 0, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2024); Off to nearly everywhere, Marquez Art Projects (Miami, 2024, forthcoming); Pandora (Sivi.), Long Story Short NYC (New York, 2023). Her selected group exhibitions include: Going Global, Cankarjev dom (Ljubljana, 2024); And the safe spots become impassable (Hong Kong, 2024); Wild: Women Abstractionists on Nature, Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Metro Manila, 2024); Untalely, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2023); Tabula Rasa: Unveiled, No.9 Cork Street (London, 2023); The last train after the last train, Public Gallery (London, 2023); Conscious Unconscious, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (London, 2023); NADA Miami 2022, presented by Tabula Rasa Gallery (Miami, 2022); It is Better to be Cats than be Loved, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2022); Made in Heaven, Des Bains (London, 2022); s02e02, International Centre of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana, 2019); and Fin-de-Siècle #III, Layer House Gallery (Kranj, 2019). Caserman’s work is included in public collections internationally including Deji Art Museum and Marquez Art Projects.
Katarina Caserman works primarily in the medium of oil painting, whose artistic practice is driven by searches for new ways to approach the imperceptible and the unknown. The exhibition title, Zone 0, is inspired by the “Zone” in Soviet authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 philosophical sci-fi novel Roadside Picnic. In some ways, Caserman’s practice, much like sci-fi stories’ imaginations of the surreal to reveal current realities, encourages self-discoveries and of the world around one through visual journeys on the painted canvas. Moreover, rather than pointing at any specifics that figurative paintings suggest, her choice of abstraction opens wider experiential and interpretive possibilities.
Caserman adopts an intuitive and improvisational approach to her painting practice to realize this process. She often starts with a tabula rasa on her mind, laying down patches of colors, lines, and textures that ultimately determine a work’s ensuing process. These initial marks also act as clues or cues the artist interacts with and responds to, then laboring over the canvas through multiple layers and repetitive gestures, allowing her to achieve the undetermined and unpredictable pictorial space. One would not find a specific focal point in her image. Instead, the painting animates a sense of movement that is spontaneous, coherent, and fluid, as if these undefined forms have warped into pathways, coming in and out of the canvas, crisscrossing each other, without a beginning or end. The experience of discovering such nebulous entanglements, cavernous pathways nestled in organic or contrasting colors, is ultimately the artist's analogy of exploring the atemporal and the placeless.
Zone 0 invites one to embark on these ever more precarious and hallucinatory journeys through Caserman’s works on canvas, diving deep into a labyrinth, to encounters, or even confrontations, with one’s secret desires, demons, the uncanny, and the infinite unknown.
Excerpted from Fiona He's article
Katarina Caserman, Lyugama Surusen (Answers in a world of blue), oil on linen, 195 × 170 cm, 2024.
About the Artist
Katarina Caserman (b.1996, Slovenia) is a London-based artist originally from Slovenia. The challenge of representing nonmaterial matter is central to Caserman's artistic inquiry. The artist believes that for each existing object, it requires a particular type of material to facilitate its growth, and within this process, the artist seeks to give form to the intangible. She recognises that thoughts, memories, and time exist beyond the bounds of our perceptible reality, yet they remain integral components of our lives. Her work aims to materialise these abstract concepts by imbuing them with tangible characteristics such as colour, shape, and movement.
Caserman obtained her MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art (2022) and her BA in Painting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana (2019). She was awarded the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia’s Scholarship for Promising Young Artists (2020). Her recent solo exhibitions include: Zone 0, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2024); Off to nearly everywhere, Marquez Art Projects (Miami, 2024, forthcoming); Pandora (Sivi.), Long Story Short NYC (New York, 2023). Her selected group exhibitions include: Going Global, Cankarjev dom (Ljubljana, 2024); And the safe spots become impassable (Hong Kong, 2024); Wild: Women Abstractionists on Nature, Metropolitan Museum of Manila (Metro Manila, 2024); Untalely, Tabula Rasa Gallery (Beijing, 2023); Tabula Rasa: Unveiled, No.9 Cork Street (London, 2023); The last train after the last train, Public Gallery (London, 2023); Conscious Unconscious, Pippy Houldsworth Gallery (London, 2023); NADA Miami 2022, presented by Tabula Rasa Gallery (Miami, 2022); It is Better to be Cats than be Loved, Tabula Rasa Gallery (London, 2022); Made in Heaven, Des Bains (London, 2022); s02e02, International Centre of Graphic Arts (Ljubljana, 2019); and Fin-de-Siècle #III, Layer House Gallery (Kranj, 2019). Caserman’s work is included in public collections internationally including Deji Art Museum and Marquez Art Projects.
Tabula Rasa Gallery (London)
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
Unit One, 99 East Road,
Hoxton, London
N1 6AQ
Tuesday - Saturday 12:00 - 18:00 | Sunday - Monday Closed
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