My main interest is to explore the world, people and relations around me. My works are oil or mixed media paintings, drawings, wood or linoleum prints and installations. The images I use in my work are often based on self-made or collected photos combined with literature, poems or phrases. I use digital tools in order to layer text, photos, and images and combine them to create a new work. Photo and text based collages will often merge into watercolor and ink drawings and these are sometimes the starting point for my large scale oil paintings. 

The emphasis of the exhibition In the Air is based on my work during the pandemic. I noticed in 2019 all the beautiful, colorful medical and microscopic images, often depicting viruses, including corona viruses. I used these microscopic images, altering them with photoshop, to create a series of watercolors on canvas. I continued this abstract series until the news of the pandemic broke. 

Once it was established that we were in a pandemic, my work shifted to automatic drawing and painting. Automatic drawings or unplanned drawings were made famous by the Surrealist movement. My ink and watercolor drawings 2020-2021 depict heads, which share space with spheres. 

I first developed these androgynous head and figure shapes when I moved to New York in 1995. The watercolor spheres appeared much later in my work around 2015, and I have combined these symbols in my most recent automatic drawings. 

In the Air includes my recent work of large scale figurative oil paintings, abstract watercolor paintings and automatic ink and watercolor drawings. Kerstin Roolfs