Office Works

1990-

Karin Sander might be considered by the art-impaired general public as merely a crazy woman in a stationery store who buys supplies and hoards them like a porno collector who fetishizes certain sex tapes. Or a cleanup lady in an office after closing time who snoops through the employees’ waste paper baskets and privately holds all the workday’s mistakes hostage. She also might be mistaken for an angry temp who’s only in the office for a day, slaving away for minimum wage, who doesn’t care about business and makes errors on purpose. But for the rest of us—the collectors with a sense of humor, the curators who see beauty where others are blind, or the critics who know magic when he or she encounters it—Karin Sander is a terrific artist whose low-budget “office drawings” are sublime, hilarious, sexy, and steeped in historical discipline.

Text: John Waters, "Waste Not, Want Not" in "Karin Sander: Office Works", 2018

Presented in exhibitions

Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden, 2012
Hafnarhús, Reykjavíc Art Museum, 2011
Kunsthalle Tübingen, 2021
FAHRBEREITSCHAFT/haubrok foundation, Berlin, 2018
Esther Schipper, Berlin, 2014
PalaisPopulaire, Berlin, 2018