Karin Sander lives and works in Berlin, but over the past thirty years she has spent considerable time in Iceland and used the country as a subject in many of her works. Karin Sander 1957–2057 is a comprehensive exhibition of Sander’s work, which is presented in collaboration with the Reykjavík Arts Festival. The show features pieces spanning the artist’s entire career and offers insight into the work of an international conceptual artist who engages with our environment and existence in unexpected and impactful ways.

Sander’s works often rely on the participation of exhibition visitors and on ideas about the influence of time and place on our self-image and appearance. One of the exhibition’s most extensive pieces is Visitors 1:8. It is technically complex and develops over the course of the exhibition through the participation of guests. Three-dimensional prints of scanned visitors form an impressive sculpture as the work comes into being before the audience’s eyes.

The exhibition features brand new paintings from the series Patina Paintings—works created by placing untreated canvas in unexpected locations. Over time, the canvases absorb the conditions of their surroundings. Instead of traditional brushwork, these pieces are formed through natural processes of weathering and thus become spontaneous landscape images of the places where they were situated. The works were created across the country and reflect the artist’s interest in the interplay of material, time, and place. The frames have weathered in all regions of Iceland, and during her stay here last summer, Sander travelled around the country, placing canvases in locations including Arnarfjörður, Kerlingarfjöll, and on the north side of Hafnarhús.

Karin Sander (b. 1957 in Bensberg, Germany) lives and works in Berlin. In her artistic practice, Karin Sander questions given situations in relation to their structural, social, and historic contexts and renders them visible through different media. She stages locations with installations, architectural interventions, and sculptures, and creates new codes for existing systems and orders. In 2023, Sander represented Switzerland at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale together with Philip Ursprung. She has received numerous international awards, including a research fellowship from the Whitney Museum in New York, the Rome Prize, and the Villa Romana Prize. Sander’s first exhibition with i8 Gallery was in 2001.