Notes

Karin Preller is a Johannesburg based artist. After a relatively brief career in law, she completed a BA (Fine Arts) degree at Unisa and an MA (Fine Arts) at the University of the Witwatersrand. She works as a lecturer and artist. Her work can broadly be described as a specific kind of photo-based painting in oil on canvas. She uses photographs as source material mainly because of the particular visual ambiguities and ambivalences that occur both in the process of photography and in its translation into paint.
Continuing her exploration of family snapshots of a specific era, the paintings are based on photographs taken in the Kruger National Park during the late 1950s. Reproduced and enlarged in oil on canvas, the peculiarities of small faded snapshots are emphasized and enhanced. As snapshots, the images are indistinguishable from thousands of others; as paintings, they possess a particular affective quality which retains our gaze.