An Artist Talks with Karen Haase, 06.01.2011, Tacheles Kunsthaus, Berlin

Karen Haase came to An Artist Talks. She first shared her passion for drawing, as a teenager she began to draw, and since then she has never stopped producing works, both paintings , drawings and performance art, as current medias. 
Her painting is influenced by Jason Pollock and Francis Bacon. And she did her studies in Art Therapy in the university, where she met Miryam Wuttke, and started to work performance art together.
They to begging with, shared a space in Berlin, where they created characters and themes.
Dr Haase is one of them and also Golden Haase .

The themes Karen explores are both visual and conceptual. They often relate to feminin ideals and dreams around relationships and marital life. The wedding is an enigmatic event, for her, where she likes to play both the groom and  the bride... Is this a seek  for success in love and life? We do not know, we can't tell? The viewer is left full of questions about his own values...
Karen often uses  sweet sugar in her performances: like the making of candy floss, or pouring sugar into little sweet boxes. It could be a way to show, that a little effort and concentration, or maybe even compromise, are necessary to achieve goals, and certainly a lot of patience...
She constructs her performance settings, and designs her costumes, mainly with white cotton or a white vail, in reference to the sweet softness of the sugar, the material is soft as well, and gives the same illusion of comfort and protection.


The use of the gold colour seems to be related to the value or symbolic, rather than the colour itself, "it is a way to give a visual value to things and object of everyday life", she says.
Her process in the performance is first visual, and then after intergrating an object, into the performance, it naturally leeds to another idea, and another, and creates her complete vision of the performance she is building. The objetcs and actions are related to one another, and like a path to follow, bring her to further actions and more ojects collected and created.