Katrin Alvarez

Katrin Alvarez (born July 9, 1944) is a German contemporary painter with an international reputation for surreal yet highly realistic works. She is a self-taught artist and has a background in journalism and writing.

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Early life

Katrin Alvarez was born in Güstrow, Mecklenburg, Germany. Her father, an army officer, died months before her birth. Her mother was an architect who worked as an art teacher. Growing up on a huge country estate, Katrin Alvarez developed a deep relationship with nature and animals. This experience has influenced her whole life. At an early age, she already found out that she was able to create a colorful and imaginative world of her own by drawing and painting.

Career

In 1969, she received a degree in law from the University of Cologne, and started working as a journalist. As the author of “Studentin S.” under the pseudonym Sybille Braatz, she created a complex psychological portrait. Later she worked as a trainee at the Kölnische Rundschau for two years. But she then decided to leave her writing career behind to focus on painting and drawing. She has, however, continued writing occasional poems and short stories as an additional form of expression.

Alvarez's fine drawing skills caught the attention of a wider audience when her portrait of Lilli Palmer was chosen for the cover of the German Jewish actress's autobiography “Change Lobster and Dance” in 1976, which became a bestseller.

In 1981, Katrin Alvarez achieved considerable success with an exhibition of a series of miniature paintings framed in pure gold, silver, and jewelry in the Galerie Kunst und Psyche in Cologne

In 2004, Katrin had her first exhibition at the prestigious Agora Gallery, a contemporary fine arts gallery in Chelsea, New York. Afterwards Katrin started to show her artwork all around the world. In 2008, Katrin Alvarez was included in Gerhard Habarta’s encyclopedia “Lexicon of Fantastic Artists”. In 2012, Katrin Alvarez has won a gold medal in the M.C.A. Cannes Azur exhibition.

Art

Alvarez has sometimes used her art as an escape from everyday reality – and sometimes as a way of documenting particular incidences which touched her heart. Thus her paintings reflect her inner world as well as her view of the dark facts of life, like child abuse and other human atrocities.

The figures shown in Alvarez’s paintings include dolls, animals, fantasy creatures and humans. They are both realistic and surrealistic. For Alvarez, each picture expresses feelings like hope and distress, loneliness and love. Usually they develop without a sketch during the process of painting. Sometimes they change direction entirely because of a sudden incident in everyday life – especially incidents concerning violation, humiliation and trauma against the helpless like children. She was inspired from the outset by Michelangelo, but also by Brueghel. The German psychiatrist Dr. Th. Gosciniak has written of her work that, “K.A.S paintings do not try to explain, educate or teach, neither do they carry a mission. They do however embed themselves deeply in anyone who gets attracted to them. They are like a stone cast into a lake. The ripples felt by the individual may expand the horizon of feelings and dreams, clearing memories from debris, thus opening a new way to find one's deeper and inner self”.

Exhibitions and awards

Alvarez exhibits her art all over the world. She has received many awards for her magnificent work.

  • 1968 – First group show, Cologne
  • 1972 –First solo show, Cologne
  • 1978- Art Basel, Switzerland
  • 1978 – Sahra Kishon, Israel
  • 2004 – Agora Gallery, New York
  • 2007 – “Exorcism” received "Allan Edwards Award in the Painting on the Edge", Vancouver
  • 2009 – “Borderline”, selected for the “Phantasten Museum”, Vienna
  • 2011 – Red Dot, Miami
  • 2012 – Solo show, Palais Palffy, Vienna

Notes

a.  

Katrin Alvarez’s book “Studentin S.” was published by the Ilmgau Verlag Pfaffenhoven in 1971 under the pseudonym Sybille Braatz.