Stephanie Keitz 
Residency:
January 28 – February 16, 2019

Stephanie Keitz was born in Greifswald, Germany and currently lives and works in Berlin and Mecklenburg-West Pomerania. Dealing with instability and decay, absence and loss is at the center of Keitz’s practice, which utilizes sculpture, object-making, and drawing. Her fragile sculptures and works on paper document attempts at capturing, as well as the futility of such attempts. Her techniques could all be said to involve preserving evidence. She tracks down the past, creating scenarios that have never existed, but that appear strangely familiar. 

From January 28 – February 16 of 2019, Stephanie Keitz will present Doubts About Spaces in 18th Street Arts Center’s Atrium Gallery. Doubts About Spaces includes two large works, Exhausted Room (2015) and Babette (2018), along with new works created in the visiting artist residency at 18th Street Arts Center in July and August 2018 and in the artist’s studio this past year. For Exhausted Room, Keitz took a cast from a shower cubicle in a bathroom in Los Angeles, giving its immaterial interior a tactile form. In the casting process, she covered the walls, floor and ceiling with a layer of latex that bonded with their surfaces like a skin. The resulting negative of the interior was created by an act of force that seemed to remove minute traces of the room’s history together with this skin. A similar reversal provides the point of departure for Babette, 2018. Here, Keitz took a cast from the tiled floor of a Kosmetiksalon Babette, a typical pavilion built between 1959 and 1964 in the former East Berlin. Exhibited as a flowing form or texture hanging in the room, the transparent skin inverts the architecture by duplicating the floor and putting it on show, complete with tell-tale signs of usage. There will be an opening reception for Doubts About Spaces on February 16, 2019 from 2-4 PM.  RSVP for tickets here.

Keitz has exhibited her work in Germany and abroad including shows at Gallery Tanja Wagner Berlin, Galerie im Turm Berlin, Villa Schöningen Potsdam, Sala Dalles Bucaresti and Deutsche Bank KunstHalle Berlin. Her films and videos have shown widely, including at Transmediale Berlin, Akademie der Künste Berlin, Leipzig International Festival for Documentary and Animated Film and Vasarely Foundation Aix en Provence.

Keitz studied design at the University of Applied Science Potsdam, and film and art at the Film University Potsdam-Babelsberg in 2009. She received the Meisterschüler degree in 2011. Keitz also received a scholarship for her study at the Film University Potsdam-Babelsberg and the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts from the Friedrich Naumann Foundation for Freedom. 

Keitz received a travel grant for her residency at 18th Street Arts Center in Los Angeles from the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture Mecklenburg-West Pomerania.

Artist Website

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