Katja Eckert
Pictures from an Imagination
“What is the use of books,” Alice thought, “without pictures …?”
Curiosity has always fired the imagination. For this reason little Alice does not hesitate before running after the white rabbit with the red eyes. She jumps after it into its den. And after a long fall lands in the middle of a fantastic world, a wonderland populated by bizarre figures. They are both polite and grotesque in their statements, and at times are bereft of any logic.
Katja Eckert is also full of curiosity, and she has an affinity with rabbits. And with hamsters, mice, guinea pigs and other ostensibly quite normal small pets. Katja Eckert does not however present them in their natural environment, but instead in water. Or, to be more precise, under water – swimming, floating, drifting. Strange that these little animals feel so at home in what is certainly not exactly their element.
How did the rabbit land up in the water? Worry not, no violence was involved. It got there by a creative act. Katja Eckert’s animal pictures are not photographical documents, but products of art. The appearance of photorealism is the result of a computer and they were not negatives developed, but pixels printed out. These strange compositions are solely the fruit of the artist’s imagination.
"What is a Caucus-race?" said Alice; not that she much wanted to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything. "Why," said the Dodo, "the best way to explain it is to do it."
Biographical information
1976
born in Rüsselsheim, Germany
1996-2005
studies Visual Communication at the Hochschule für Gestaltung, Offenbach/Main under Prof. Heiner Blum
lives in Berlin, Germany