"I Was Born Far Away From Home"

NK: I'm actually looking at a painting of yours right now from your show at Open Forum Never Afraid After Dark, and it's a painting that I don't understand at all from a logical perspective. I wonder when you're painting how these images get built up. Does it start with a sketch or is it something that's more of an organic transmutation of a feeling?

SK: I operate rather from premeditated intentions, than concrete steps. This has to do with the fact that I operate in images not in ideas or concepts. That's the reason why I believe faces and bodies are more substantial than the storyline of the painting. If I imagine a successful painting, there's something very alive about it. There has to be something extremely vivid about the expression of the creatures I depict.

NK: When I first saw your work online, two paintings struck me immediately: Double Venus (2019) and Double Mars (2019). They appeared heavily layered with time and age — like icons that had been touched by a thousand pilgrims. Could you talk about the archive of work you've been building for years and how your process often involves using time as a medium?

SK: I think the viewer may perceive them as 'sacred' because the realm of my paintings operates around an imaginary that includes themes tied very closely to private identity: sexuality, gender, race, social hierarchy. Normally, I work on a painting anywhere between two and five years. I suppose that my search for the image does materialize on canvas in the form of smudges and disintegrated surfaces.

"I have annals of unfinished work that I have been building up over the last ten years. I call it my 'forest' of paintings."

NK: This chaos inside of you, where does that come from?

SK: I was born far away from home. My mother comes from the island Sakhalin, on the Russian Pacific coast, north of Japan, and my father is from a tiny city in eastern Slovakia. I think already to my parents and my siblings, I was a stranger. This pattern has repeated in my personal life. I grew up in various European countries, therefore, I look at western painting through an unconventional cultural lens.

NK: You grew up moving around a lot — is there a link between this transience and queerness, finding belonging in a community of others who don't belong?

SK: No, I've never belonged anywhere, and I've always known that would remain throughout my life: trying and failing. I am a stranger and I always will be. So for example, me being an immigrant, there is a "transness" aspect to my identity, being trans-national. If you think of "Western" and "Eastern" women, they are socially and culturally coded in very different ways within Germany, with very distinct images.

NK: A lot of contemporary work is very connected to current events. Your work, to me, feels the opposite. What world do your figures inhabit?

SK: I'm mesmerized by otherness. My paintings are often populated by strange people from urban societies. By strange, I mean really strong or fragile or bored or sedated or coy people. Sometimes they play weird games or take part in initiation rituals.

"I think standing with otherness is an antidote to art that depicts everyday life in a manageable manner. My subject's identity is crucially not yours — I am reliving a life of trials before your eyes, vibrating like a tuning fork."

NK: In your paintings, is everybody queer? Do they live in a queer utopia, or is this tension between queer and normative at play?

SK: I would say they live in queer vertigo, not utopia or dystopia. Utopia, in its translation, means 'no place'. I am more interested in the conflict that this state bears within itself. This motivates me to do a lot of painting.

NK: You have spoken about images versus narration — how you're more interested in faces and less interested in the story they're trying to tell. When you're thinking about putting a group of paintings together for an exhibition, what goes through your mind?

SK: In a good show, you enter, recognize, and recall because it feels so potent and familiar, like a déjà vu. At Open Forum in Berlin, I named my show Eastern Promises. For five years, I worked in a club from 11pm until 9am on weekends as a bouncer. My favorite part of club life was the sun appearing in the East, after a long and sweaty night.

NK: What drew you to being a bouncer versus just being a partygoer?

SK: My job as a bouncer taught me a lot about art. I was working at Salon des Amateurs, located in the Kunstverein building in Düsseldorf, which was very popular with artists, musicians, collectors, curators, DJs. One of the funniest things I realized working there was that art students could learn more in clubs than in art school, because of the direct social interaction.

NK: Is that similar to composing a good painting?

SK: Certainly. You observe the faces and body language of partygoers and learn to read them, but in the end, much remains a mystery. Art has its own rules — and one of them is that you must pay more attention to it than anything else in the world if you are going to be true to yourself.

NK: I'm interested in how parts of your figures are rendered very loosely and fluidly, while other areas convey a very strong idea — how might that relate to ideas of fluidity, dysmorphia, and dissociation?

SK: The figures in my paintings frequently have a supernatural character. Ghosts, angels, fauns and other mythic creatures often populate them. For me it was a crucial moment when I realized that dysmorphia is the spirit translating your body, your vessel, into a possibly very dark and twisted version of yourself. When I assemble the body the wrong way — like a puzzle — I am meditating on this inner life.

"I think with good paintings you kind of become aware and you stop seeing the image and you just start feeling the presence."

NK: Maybe paintings can be thought of as containers for emotional residue — not just for the painter or the sitter, but the object itself which has been charged with energy over time.

SK: With Titian, and many of my favorite painters, when you go into their shows, you don't need to focus, but still you start seeing something resembling yourself. A very murky silhouette, but you sense there is someone real out there. Through this painting you can become sad, joyful, loving, you can learn. Anything human can be felt through painting, which means that there is no limit to the creation — it's infinite.