Meet One of Marc Jacobs’s Favorite Artists, the Starry-Eyed Painter Karen Kilimnik
Up for sale at Sotheby’s this week from the collection of Marc Jacobs is a 1996 painting by Karen Kilimnik, Mary Calling Up a Storm. The designer speaks of it with such great passion it’s a wonder that he’s able to part with it. “I have this primitive connection to it,” he said in an interview with Amy Cappellazzo, Sotheby’s chairman and executive vice president. Adding another layer is Jacobs’s identification with the artist herself: “I think of Karen as if she is me, like if I were a little girl in my own little bedroom. I imagined Karen before I met her, with unicorns and daisies over the eyes and stuff like that in a glittery kind of Aurora Borealis little bedroom.”
Bedroom. That word again. For more than three decades, Kilimnik’s work has been likened to the aesthetic, or contents, of a teenage girl’s bedroom. Why? The fact that she’s a female artist surely has something to do with it. Then there’s Kilimnik’s fondness for rhinestones and stickers, ballet, and the rococo flourish. Behind all of that is the palpable feeling of the artist’s obsessiveness and childlike delight in the objects of her obsession. Fashion is one of those things.
The art world first fell in love with Kilimnik in the 1980s, particularly with her scratchy drawings of fashionable people like Kate Moss, Brigitte Bardot, and the like. If the depictions are PG or maybe PG-13, the narratives veer from PG to rated R. Kilimnik sketches in pencil on paper, paints in oil on canvas, takes photographs, makes collages, and bejewels store-bought puzzles. But no matter the medium, her clever titles—such as Me Waiting for My Drug Dealer Boyfriend...Park Avenue...oops...Forgot...the Village, 1967—reframe the image, often in a way that disorients the viewer’s sense of time or context. Because some of her drawings referenced fashion ads or depicted models or actors, critics too easily linked her work to celebrity and media culture. “I love Kate Moss, fashion, and all that,” the artist tells Vogue, “but the older drawings were really about things other than celebrities. If you look through the really old drawings of the 1980s, it’s more about [the subject playing] a character. Like there’s a drawing of Naomi Campbell [that] has nothing to do with her being a celebrity or fashion model. [I was reading an] article—it was in Paris Match, I’m always trying to learn languages—and it said something [like] ‘She’s scared of nothing,’ and that’s what I liked. It was about her personality and her character rather than [Naomi] being a celebrity.”
Though Kilimnik’s work seems steeped in history, she isn’t reverent about much of anything. Appreciative, yes, in a fangirl type of way, but the seeming naivete of Kilimnik’s work is deceiving. It has also led some critics to fault her technique. There is a loose quality to the artist’s paint strokes, and she’s been known to “bedazzle” a painted landscape with the addition of rhinestones or adhere shiny fish stickers over a photograph. Then too there are Kilimnik’s idiosyncratic takes on the Old Masters, which possibly comment on the hierarchy of art and the role of women within the art world. (It’s difficult to pin the artist down. “I say something and then I realize I completely meant the opposite,” Kilimnik muses.)
Early on Kilimnik was described as a “scatter” artist—a sort of pre-digital way of describing a kind of cut-and-paste or assemblage technique. Because Kilimnik’s aesthetic is über feminine, it’s easy for some to dismiss the work as being surface or “girly.” But this artist’s world is not all sugar; there’s spice too. What looks familiar—a sketch of supermodel, a line from an advertising campaign—slips away from its conventional moorings when filtered through her personal, and consistent, point of view. Partial to fairy tales, the artist has written herself into a tale of her own invention.
Thirty-plus years into her career, Kilimnik still has stars in her eyes. She’s also a serious artist: the estimate on Mary Calling Up a Storm is between $80,000 and $120,000. That’s some pretty potent magic.
Here, the artist, whose work is currently on display at 303 Gallery, talks us through some of her favorite pieces.
These captions have been edited for clarity.
Photos: © Karen Kilimnik / Courtesy of 303 Gallery1/15Karen Kilimnik
Side 1: Hypnotized rabbit; side 2: A windy day at the beach with perfume and jewelry, 1983
I used to draw on both sides to save money on paper. This [drawing has] a hypnotized rabbit on one side, and jewelry and perfume on the other. I always wanted to be a fashion designer, and a jewelry designer, and I still do. I did design some things, a long, long time ago based on the The Lord of the Rings’s elves and the dwarves. [They were] cloaks and they had like, gold braids and hoods and everything. I dyed everything myself in a big enamel pot on the stove, and I took it around, only to one place, in Philadelphia. That didn’t work out, so I gave up, which I shouldn’t have done. Now I know you don’t give up.
Photo: © Karen Kilimnik / Courtesy of 303 Gallery2/15Karen Kilimnik
Cows in the english mist, 1984 (printed 2004) + Cows in England, 1984 (printed 2004)
These photos are my [take on George] Stubbs’s, Mares and Foals in a River Landscape—but in cows and sheep. I learned about Stubbs because my sister was horse crazy growing up, and she had a postcard of [that painting]. In 1984 my mom and I went to visit my brother, who was studying or working, in Lausanne[, Switzerland,] and Trier[, Germany]. We all went onto London, and then my mom and I continued on to see Blenheim Palace. The camera lens was fogged in the first photo, so I made up that it was an English mist. The second photo was taken shortly after the first [and] the lens cleared up, so the mist is gone.
