Karen Kilimnik
Swan Lake
Kunsthaus Glarus, Switzerland
Through June 25, 2023

The exhibition at Kunsthaus Glarus presents two installative settings featuring Kilimnik's works Swan Lake (1992) and Kitri and friends at the garden folly (2004). Flanking these are paintings from different years that depict a “forest clearing as stage” theme but which also engage intrinsically with presence and absence. With these and other works, the exhibition highlights Kilimnik’s artistic ability to continually renegotiate the conditions of established narratives within and beyond her time.

Karen Kilimnik
The Kingdom of the Renaissance
January 20–March 25, 2023
New York

The Kingdom of the Renaissance, an exhibition of works by Karen Kilimnik and her old master predecessors, curated by Mireille Mosler. Inspired by a range of sources, from old masters to pop culture, Kilimnik conjoins elements to construct her own universe. From the Prague menagerie in the thirteenth century through to celebrities' pooches, the artist transports her inner imaginary world through source material procured from magazines and museum postcards. Early works on paper from the 1980s, oil sketches and recent paintings are paired with Renaissance sculptures, paintings and drawings.

Karen Kilimnik
Early Drawings 1976–1998
April 8–May 21, 2022

Sprüth Magers is delighted to announce the solo exhibition Early Drawings 1976–1998 by Karen Kilimnik at the London space, presented jointly with Galerie Eva Presenhuber in New York. Spread across all three gallery floors, over 50 previously unseen early drawings will be on view, depicting portraits of British figures both semi-fictional and real, derived from the worlds of film, fashion, royalty and aristocracy, as well as more general themes such as London city views.

The accompanying exhibition at Galerie Eva Presenhuber will run April 30–June 18, 2022 in New York.

Karen Kilimnik
September 12–October 26, 2019
Los Angeles

One of the most important representatives of figurative painting, sculpture, video and installation in the last four decades, Karen Kilimnik continues to produce work that is as diverse as it is groundbreaking. The artist brings together historical cultural references—including ballet, the aristocracy, 14th to 18th-century painting, Romanticism, and the Second World War—with the spheres of books, music, film and television.

Karen Kilimnik
April 13–May 26, 2018
London

Karen Kilimnik’s latest exhibition with Sprüth Magers brings together works from across four decades in her career as one of the most important representatives of figurative painting, sculpture and installation. Included in the exhibition is an early example of her sculptures, as well as early drawings, and more recent paintings and prints in her delightful and darkly humorous style. Kilimnik’s diverse practice is recognised for activating relationships between the traditions of culture and art history. Frequently, she combines figures and motifs from art history and collective memory – ballerinas, aristocracy, the Second World War – with cultural references to music, media and film.

Karen Kilimnik
May 20–June 20, 2015
London

For her third exhibition at Sprüth Magers, London, Karen Kilimnik has created a group of small-scale paintings based mostly on appropriated images, many of these from traditional Delftware, which she suffuses with her own imaginative preoccupations. The resulting body of work, made over the past two years, expresses the artist’s enduring qualities of openness and precision, elegance and humour.

Karen Kilimnik
February 7–March 8, 2014
Berlin

Over the past two decades, Karen Kilimnik has become known for her playful treatment of nostalgia, combining a love for stories, costumes and magic to create highly theatrical yet intimate exhibitions. Using a wide range of media, including installation, drawing and photography, and not least her distinctive paintings, she orchestrates a range of references, from scraps of nature to the trappings of European aristocracy. In her exhibition in Berlin, adapted and expanded from her show organized by Le Consortium, Dijon, for the vineyard L’Académie Conti in Burgundy, Kilimnik will exhibit a body of work that juxtaposes images of wealth and war, fairytales and femininity.

Joseph Cornell Karen Kilimnik
Joseph Cornell, Edgar Degas, Karen Kilimnik
June 9–August 28, 2010
London

This exhibition shows works by American artists Joseph Cornell and Karen Kilimnik, displayed together for the first time. Through the use of paintings, collage and installation, the exhibition will explore the affinities between both artists who were influenced by the Romantic ballet era.

Karen Kilimnik
Heathers
November 27, 2008–January 31, 2009
Berlin

Karen Kilimnik’s video ‘Heathers’, produced in 1994, is resented in an austere and sepulchral physical environment, the video work is based on the cult American satire Heathers (1989), directed by Michael Lehmann and starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater who were at the time idols to a generation of angst-ridden youth.

Karen Kilimnik
November 17, 2007–January 19, 2008
Cologne

The exhibition comprises works on paper, photographs and new oil paintings. As in her last solo exhibition at the London gallery, Kilimnik is also showing an installation of a forest, in this case a fairytale birch forest in winter. The artist for one uses well-known historical clichés; for another she cites the present in her installations. A sense of the artificial, of staging, is characteristic of her work. Since the 1990s she has been seen as a precursor for this kind of theatrical mise-en-scène installation art.

Karen Kilimnik
June 19–July 21, 2007
London

Renowned as one of the pioneers in the early 1990’s for her deconstructed installations and assemblages of seemingly random objects with an emphasis on ‘throw away’ materials – Kilimnik’s paintings and installations are a highly personalised appropriation of historical and contemporary sources. Drawing on the world of fairy tales, romance, ballet, mysteries, various magazines and newspapers, TV, European stately homes and painters such as Stubbs, Oudry and Raeburn, Kilimnik casts these diverse elements like a stage director in her own play.