SOFACQ Gallery

Karin Hanssen lives and works in Antwerp. She is regarded as one of the enduring female painters who emerged in the early Nineties as part of the new Flemish painting scene.  Hanssen's paintings and drawings are replete with meticulously constructed layers of philosophical and pictorial meanings, and reward prolonged looking. She incessantly explores the concepts of temporal disorientation, social semiotics, feminism, the 'Rückenfigur', the (absent) gaze, and 'The Borrowed Gaze'.  For the past two decades Hanssen has worked in series. Her clearly defined cycles of work consistently expand her temporal, spatial and gendered constructions. Her paradigmatic portraits and scenarios - painted in hazy colours - are embedded in deterministic environments, ranging from domestic interiors to holiday landscapes derived from Fifties' and Sixties' magazine photography.