D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present our third solo exhibition with German conceptual artist Karin Sander. The exhibition will consist of works from the series titled Mailed Paintings. Without prior manipulation the primed store-bought canvases were mailed unwrapped to the gallery from various international locations thus visually transcribing the distance by collecting marks on their unprotected surfaces along the journey.

The Mailed Paintings along with Gebrauchsbilder (pictures for use) are projects that are part of a larger body of work titled The Patina Paintings. In Gebrauchsbilder the paintings start out as blank canvases and autonomously create themselves by absorbing the patina of the environment where they are installed for a period of time, such as a coal cellar or deck of a ship. In a similar way, the Mailed Paintings collect patina from handling and the exposure to the elements along their postal route and are considered done when they arrive at the gallery.

The monochromatic white surfaces act as self-writing diaries that record the journey of the work. This process embraces chance and risk and points to the larger conceptual practice of Karin Sander, who always operates in the extended field of painting by putting an emphasis on the environment of the exhibition and the circumstances surrounding it, like in her well-known polished wall pieces. The collected patina exaggerates and mirrors the effect of the passage of time on the surface of the painting, and her installation in the gallery is reminiscent of both Suprematism and the ready-made.

In 2007 Karin Sander was featured in a group exhibition titled What Is Painting? at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY. In 2006 Karin Sander had a solo exhibition at SAFN, Reykjavik, Iceland. Her work has been shown at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea, Santiago de Compostela, Spain; and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart Germany among many others.