B&C 20 (2025) Painting by Birgit Karg

Accompanying text for a studio exhibition at the State Gallery of Modern Art in Munich in 1991

"The artist, born in 1938, began concentrating her energies on painting relatively late. For a long time, family took priority; for a long time, there were other necessities that inevitably hindered her own artistic development.
And so, strictly speaking, her biography as an artist—apart from an unverifiable lifelong inner ion for painting and the problems associated with it—began only ten years ago. Birgit Karg moved from the city to a small first-grade schoolhouse in the Allgäu region, which also served as the family's vacation home. Except for with family and sporadic with her closest friends, she lives there in complete, almost monastic seclusion and outward modesty, completely focused on her work.
When I first saw the artist's paintings – as a Munich neighbor and long-time acquaintance, I had this rare privilege back in the early 1980s – I was struck by an intensity and density that has never left me since. It was during this time that Birgit Karg repeatedly spent time at the slaughterhouse, taking photographs of killed animals, of dissected carcasses, of oozing, bleeding intestines and entrails – a manic-obsessive mourning process characterized by feelings of guilt and pity as well as fascination. Parallel to this, I began to engage with human waste, with environmental destruction and genetic processes, with cellular changes—in other words, with problem areas in which growth and extinction, life and death, enter into a direct symbiosis.
She creates skull images and works with vegetatively changing forms reminiscent of intestines, in muted, tonal, and precious-looking color nuances, sometimes applied in a translucently thin layer and then again as a tactilely tangible material layer:
"Initially, I think it's more a position of dissatisfaction or grief that leads me to choose or examine motifs like visiting a slaughterhouse, photographing dismembered animals, or treating dismembered material as waste, garbage, empty skulls, cells, signs... The colors I use tend to be brackish, dark, muddy, dense, and applied in several layers, or poured in a very thin layer."
She experiments with materials such as hydrochloric acid, saltpeter, dragon's blood, lead, and iron. to test different processes of decomposition in which, as in Surrealism, handwriting is simultaneously suppressed."

• Nationality:
• Date of birth : 1938
• Artistic domains:
• Groups: Contemporary German Artists