To accompany her debut exhibition with Karsten Schubert London, Kirsten Glass is interviewed by curator and artist Cathy Lomax.
Excerpt:
There is something about witchcraft that resonates with our times. Of course, there is the imagery, the clichés of broomsticks and cauldrons, and the surface and subversion of supernatural practices ramped up to pop-tastic levels in films such as The Craft (1996) and more recently The Love Witch (2016). But beyond this hysteria there is something deeper and more important at play, as I found out when I visited Kirsten Glass
in her studio in South London in spring 2020 in the lead-up to her show Swimming Witches at Karsten Schubert. The levity of this title reflects Glass’s interest in occult and pagan spiritual practices, while at the same time deflecting our desire to (in Kirsten’s words) ‘know the fuck out of everything’. The same is true of her darkly intense paintings that draw us in with their alluring surfaces, their sprinklings of glitter and patches of intense colour, while also confounding us with their resonating layers of meaning.
