biography – series : Realms of Signs, Realms of Senses
exhibition 2001 : Surface Tension
exhibition 2003 : New Burlesque
exhibition 2005 : Mermaids / Waterpark
exhibition 2009 : Portrait of the artist as a young mother
Surface Tension - March 20 > May 10, 2001

Katharina Bosse was born in 1968. She grew up in Germany and she studied Visual Communications at the FH Bielefeld.
In 1994, she received a DAAD grant and started to show her work in exhibitions in Germany and the United States. she moved to New-York in 1997 where she was recently featured in a group show at the Museum of Modern Art . Today is her first solo exhibition in Paris.
untitled, 1997
color negative print, 60 x 50 cm
All right reserved.©Katharina Bosse, 1997
untitled, 1994
color negative print, 60 x 50 cm
All right reserved.©Katharina Bosse, 1994
Inside-Out
Katharina Bosse’s photographs are part of this culture of the surface -this seductive, enchanting realm. They are at once mirrors in which you might discover your own identity and windows through which you might escape the present into some bizarre world beyond.
First there are the vacant interiors ; spaces saturated with often kitsch, bourgeois ornamentation ; outmoded spaces, which, as Walter Benjamin might say, begin to yield up their moment of obsolescence. These are curious interiors, in which you become a form of voyeur - a bizarre world opening up beyond the surface of the photograph. You are invited to step from the outside into these intriguing spaces, into another world, to tip-toe through them, always wary that, as Alice’s tale of her explorations through the looking-glass, somme strange character might suddenly appear.
In the next photographs, some such characters do appear - marginal, in-between characters who seem to belong to and reflect their marginal, in-between surroundings. Heterotopic characters in heterotopic spaces. And yet, like the characters from the pack of cards in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, they do not appear quite real. The subjects are like cardboard cut-outs - shadowless, they appear to have virtually no depth. Like photographs they are creatures of the surface. These are portraits of individuals who wear their identity on the surface, yet who never fully disclose their true identity. Although full of suggestive details and rich colour, the images never quite give up their secrets of their subjects. (...)

From the text Through the Looking glass by Neil Leach
published in Surface Tension / Kruse