PRISTERINNEN

Katharina Goldyn, self-staging is so important that genuine identity might be just hidden: faces painted in black, disguised bodies, male and female attributes mixed in one person, old-fashioned and most modern utensils – which we know, which we are identifying ourselves with – as well as typical Christian symbols are mixed by the artist in an unorthodox, trendy and grasping way in one picture.

 

She thematises christianity and the innocence related to the female character in her current photography Priestess with Apple. The apple as a sign of male sin provoked by guilty woman is the origin of a patriarchal men’s world.

 

However, women have contributed in a very strong way: for example Maria Magdalena here in this picture: colorful and modern; instead of the attributes Myrrh and Cross, she is holding an egg and a cabbage. Both are signs of a property deprived from female sex: Cabbage, for example, is an allusion to birth and thus a sign for female fertility in some European countries.

 

In this way, Katharina continues her research regarding female roles in church, developing cycles such as female apostles and priests up to cardinals.

 

She wonders if today’s society would be quite different, if the allocation after the Fall hadn’t been!?

 

In consequence, her figures are self-conscious feminists acting bright and big in the center of her works, where the “eternal female” can be found in multiple ways. For example, the breasts in her pictures are a symbol of giving and preserving life, or the multiple bras appear like a female armour like in the proverb “with the weapons of a woman”.

 

But this woman is going even further: She takes „the” toy of a man – the real weapon – in a quite casual and modern way on a bicycle, as if it was us today.

 

Do they want to be like men?

 

That’s not possible either! Femininity is quite different from man’s nature. But the effects of oppression are vehement, so that the armed woman would now blow herself up.

 

Most of her themes are surrounded by religious influences, due to her longing for holiness and spirituality since she was a child.

 

Just this should provide independence and a way to a subterranean world – the spiritual one. (…),,

 

Florentine Rosemeyer

 

Kunsthistorikern, -beraterin und -kommunikation