'Womb'

by Katharina Kaminski

14 October — 20 December 2023

Curated by Dayneris Brito

'Womb'  is the title of the first exhibition by Uruguayan artist Katharina Kaminski in Paris taking place at the Sainte Anne Gallery. But 'Womb' goes beyond a simple exhibition proposal. It represents a birth: the conceptualization of the creation's inception, emphasizing the grandeur of the creative act, the almost shamanic ability to give life to something that is not necessarily human but is molded and generated with the artist's hands, as is the case with clay and sculpture.

The materiality of the sculpted object becomes a primary need in this show: the need to be and know oneself as fertile. Thus, 'Womb' — whose title refers to the female reproductive organ - aims to question the limits of fertility, revolving around the myth of creation and the higher force that makes it possible, a question that has accompanied the artist over the years.

Katharina is scientifically considered an intersex person, as she was born with XY chromosomes typical of the male gender but in a morphologically female body with no womb and ovaries. Being born physically outside the binary norm of gender is estimated to be present in 1.7% of the world's population. Therefore, her sensitivity stems from a cosmic and ethereal universe that does not ignore life's contrasts; rather, it arises from them to fulfill her existence. Starting from her own body, she explores the infinite space of human sensitivity, a body she has learned to align within a physical-mental dimension to master her emotions and use them as a pure state of creation.

Aware and proud of her uniqueness, her works are the result of a provoked need to break away from the established, expressing herself from that alternate space outside social norms. For her, creating is a sort of ritual that allows her to process her sexuality and physicality. The sacred question — "what am I and where do I come from?" — takes a central place in her work, accompanied by other questions that arise as she explores her many concerns: where does the limit of our sensorial experience lie, and who decides what we are? Why are we this way?

To develop her cosmogony, the artist uses a visual language that borders on the strangeness of forms and draws from genres such as surrealism and abstraction, a kind of mannerism attributed to the  body language she explores and unveils. But this estrangement finds a clear meaning in Kaminski's case. Katharina sculpts and molds against the norm imposed by reason and logic, inspired only by her intuition and immersing herself in the hidden language of dreams and in her innermost thoughts.

This is how 'Womb,' in addition to being an ode to strength and the inner capacity given to us, proposes new - other - ways of looking at the biological, considering the infinite breadth of nature and highlighting the existing gaps between the physical and the ethereal, the material and the spiritual. Who are we before and after our body?

The exhibition features a group of sculptures in ceramic, marble, and bronze, varied in scale and form: zoomorphic, amorphous, alien, meteoric. Some of them are light and humorous, while others are more intense and ghostly, but they all seem like extraterrestrial beings gracefully invading the exhibition space with purpose.

At the same time, the display could be seen as a surreal landscape of timeless and laconic objects, a reflection of a dreamlike world that is intimate and unique. Sometimes we get the impression that her sculptural beings speak to us, whispering in our ear the mystery of life, the answers to the questions that so obsess human life.

On the ground floor, we find Telescopio Invertido, a piece in bronze and marble that stands out for its technical skill, monumentality, and spatiality. This work represents a leap to a higher scale in Kaminski's visual repertoire. Meanwhile, the second floor of the gallery is occupied by the exhibition's eponymous installation, composed of 10 clay sculptures. It is a sanctuary of dancing sculptural bodies around the fire. A choreography of the physical where light, heat, and sound produce a unique sensory activation, evoking a tribal dance or ritual; a pure space that reconnects us with the earth and our roots.

—Dayneris Brito