Sandrine Kern
SANDRINE KERN | Paris, France
Sandrine Kern's work is indicative of landscapes conjured by memory that communicate residual emotions to her viewers.
The thick surfaces of her paintings are built up through her unique alteration of a technique similar to encaustic. Instead of utilizing hot wax in her process, Kern combines oil sticks, oil paint, and cold wax to create a creamy, rich surface filled with depth. She then further manipulates the surface though the reductive process of scraping away layers with a knife and solvents.
Sandrine Kern lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She was born in Paris, France where she received an MFA from the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts. Her work has been shown nationally in solo shows as well as featured in numerous magazines and publications. Kern's work has been collected by The Mitchell Collection, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, David Schwimmer, and Lisa Kudrow.
Kern stresses the mood of each work by highlighting the surface luminosity through her use of a high contrast color palette. The highly suggestive representation of each natural element she depicts is void of details that define a specific location. Instead, the paintings convey the essence of form but are still recognizably landscapes. For Kern, each painting represents the mood of a past moment, and contains a certain freedom of motion which keeps the work from appearing static.