Biography

Tamara K.E. is a Georgian-born German artist. She emerged from the Dusseldorf art scene in the early 2000s, where she was based from 1997 onwards. She studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, and Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, where she graduated in 2004. Since 2010, K.E. has lived and worked in Brooklyn and Dusseldorf.

The artist is best known for both her radical, socio-critical conceptual paintings, as well her recent works. The latter are large-scale paintings combining traditional oil paint with printed images manipulated on Photoshop, where she experiments widely with visual idioms and the technical possibilities afforded by drawing on new technologies. Her obsessive, continually evolving language addresses the dynamics of our cultural memories. She establishes seemingly random, free-flowing systems of codes, signifiers, and energy fields to create a kind of stage for that final outcry of farewell to history, moving forward to a yet unseen future, as she describes it.

K.E. represented Georgia at the 50th Venice Biennale and was invited for the 1st Prague Biennial. She participated in shows in the U.S. and Europe and has exhibited at Haus Huth, Daimler Contemporary Berlin, Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Central House of Artists, Moscow, CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam, Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal, Kunsthalle Hamburg and elsewhere. Her work group Next Comes Democracy, which she created in collaboration with Hans Mayer Gallery (Dusseldorf), is on permanent display at Daimler Contemporary Headquarters at Haus Huth, Berlin.

In recent years, Tamara K.E. has won a number of art awards, including the Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken (Germany), the UBS Art Award for Young Art (Switzerland), and The European Prize for Painting (Belgium). She was nominated for the Fountainhead Artist Residency in Miami, the residency at Etaneno Museum im Busch, Namibia, and for the International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York.

K.E. has lectured and held workshops at: Goldsmiths University of London, Kunstakademie Kassel, Berlin University of the Arts, New York Studio Residency Program, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, Dresden Academy of Fine Arts.

K.E.’s work can be found in number of public and private art collections including the UBS Private Bank Collection, Deutsche Bank Collection, Daimler Contemporary Art Collection, Van Der Heydt Museum Sammlung, Sammlung der Galerie der Stadt Esslingen, Museum SAFN Reykjavík, Deutsche Apotheker- und Ärztebank Sammlung, Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg, as well in Jochen and Susi Holy Collection (Munich), Collection Susanne Porsche (Munich), Edward & Phyllis Kwalwasser Art Collection (NYC), Sammlung Philara (Dusseldorf), among others.

The artist is included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, published by Thames & Hudson in 2014.

The first monograph on K.E.’s work none of us and somewhere else (Kehrer Verlag, 2007), for which Boris Groys (NYU) and Renate Wiehager (Daimler Contemporary) contributed essays, was dedicated to her critical approach. In his essay A Private View, Boris Groys writes: “...The accumulation of images, objects, and texts we encounter in her installations seem to be almost coincidental. They do not contain a clearly definable message, no unmistakable definable origin, no easily recognizable context. Rather these installations seduce the visitor into a free and slightly dreamy game of associations. Although these installations are not Baroque and do not essentially infringe the minimalistic-geometric canon of today‘s Post-Conceptual Art, they send the viewer into a state of pleasant bewilderment – the more so as, in all the heterogeneity of their components, they are staged in Dadaistic and a stylish, aesthetically well-balanced manner”.

Robert Fleck wrote on recent group of works Revisiting Fear: “At long last a new form of image. The new series of works uniquely combines the new links between painting, digital processes and photography such as is arising in the 21st century and emphatically help shape art”.

K.E.’s second monograph fading song in the wide open is published by DISTANZ Verlag in collaboration with Uta Grosenick and with the essays by Gregor Jansen (Kunsthalle Dusseldorf) and Gean Moreno (ICA Miami).

K.E.’s most recent shows include 5 minutes random love at Beck & Eggeling Contemporary, Dusseldorf, and 31:Women at Daimler Collection, Berlin.

In 2020 Tamara K.E. had a solo exhibition "Ink Under the Skin" at Aurel Scheibler, Berlin