Being a painter in a man's world

Katrin Plavcak is an artist who is prepared to ask difficult questions. Throughout her talk yesterday, she posed questions which were both rhetorical but also highly relevant: “are you an artist or a painter?”, “do you feel outdated being a painter?”, and “isn’t painting just an excuse to smoke cigarettes?”. Her work embraces painting - something she still strives to perfect - but also installations, sculpture, textiles and more.

Plavcak described her Berlin studio in detail, and how it functions in her work. Running a studio, she suggested, is a “conservative thing to do”, and she believes it is becoming less common. But it is nevertheless a central to her work: it is a place “out of time and space”, where she passes ideas through herself “like a filter”. One of the best moments in life, she says, is entering the studio each morning and viewing the previous day’s work.

She also spoke about some of the women artists who have influenced and inspired her. Many are great names who were famous in their own lifetimes, but whom the vagaries of art history have overlooked or even intentionally ignored. Remarkable artists such as Sofonisba Anguissola, Livinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Leyster, Maria Sibylla Merian, Rachel Ruysch, Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Rosa Bonheur, Elizabeth Thompson Butler, and Mary Cassatt. These were women who succeeded in an art world dominated by men and male prejudice, several of them becoming members of elite academies of art. They represented a defiant attitude - Gentileschi proclaimed that within her “bosom sleeps the heart of a Caesar”. Plavcak looks to these figures and also draws on Virginia Woolf’s “Room of One’s Own” to identify the qualities a woman needs to survive in the art world.