Karin Welponer
∗1941, Italy
lives and works in Bolzano, Italy
Karin Welponer’s research has always been profoundly linked to the medium of drawing, used as early on as her graphic illustrations of the 1960s and still featured in her most recent series of works dedicated to the female body. The Sahara and the Arabian deserts, from where she returned with travel diaries, sketches and watercolours, and with the experience of her close contact with desert communities, who welcomed her into their households. The North African desert was also the starting point for her projectPath of a Cube(1993), in which she explored a cube-shaped structure discovered in the sandy landscape, the origin and meaning of which was unknown to the people living there. In numerous watercolours, drawings, collages and installations, she repeatedly recalled this cube as a symbolic examination of the relationship between the artefact and the natural world. Her most extensive series of watercolours of African landscapes, presented to the public for the first time as part of Biennale Gherdëina 9 in her installation Stone portraits, was created in the Algerian desert, where the artist returned several times during the 1980s. Equipped with pencil, charcoal, red chalk and watercolours, she travelled long stretches of the desert together with members of the Tuareg community, drawing under the open sky or in the shelter of a rock or a dune. These watercolours document specific places, some of which are no longer accessible to Western visitors today. They are intimate traces of the artist’s close relationship with the African mountain and desert landscape, and at the same time, evidence of a geological narrative designed to connect the imagery of her native Dolomite mountains to theNorth-African Tassili.
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