Isolde Kille, a visual artist exploring a variety of materials and locations in both complexities and simplicities. (...) Kille's works involve both an introspective search for meaning and identity and yet a universal exploration of humanities roll and part on this slightly of kilt oval ball. She works in both small and very large scales; many pieces seem to play between macro and micro views of the cosmos or cellular slide presentations.

Part 1 Artists featured are Robert Rauschenberg, Isolde Kille, Julie Schenkelberg, and Andrea Burgay.


"(...) Kille's new works are like snapshots of the surface of the earth, or the distant cosmic scenery glimpsed in distinct but minute explosions of pure energy and color. Kille has always worked at a deeper and more reflective resolve than many others; her work continues to engage with primal elements, and now she employs the raw materials themselves, for their texture, their symbolism, and their presence. Works from her Earth Capsules series are the ones that most impress me, for they combine the usually toxic materials of painting with natural materials as an accrual of nature presence, a collaboration or conversation between the artists and her immediate environment. Composed at a large scale and hung low to the surface of the floor, they are meant to be confronted in the most direct manner possible. To stand close to them is to likewise be immersed in the ground, to lay on a mountain, or a plain; to stare into an immense emptiness from the bedrock of an immense heaviness and hardness of land. The combined effect of opposed elemental impressions creates a sense memory that begs to be mined and evoked creatively. (...)"

Masks, Mirages, and the Morphic Mirror


One sequence, two mountains, three figures and four trees ...

Every 5 seconds, sometimes, one of them looks up and reveals her story. She 

who knows 

he knows not, longing 

for them who know 

not they know not

and for them who know that they are. 

I am not here.

Does she walk in her sleep?


The Masks are made out tree bark, sticks, earth, paper, glue and mirror. The ponchos are wearable paintings.

Luca Curci talks with Timespecific aka Isolde Kille, during MIXING IDENTITIES, the third appointment of CANVAS ART FAIR, at THE LINE Contemporary Art Space.


Isolde Kille is a contemporary German-American artist known for her experimental approach working in painting, photography, installation and video/film. “I like to invent materials”, she explains, “I think it is part of my job, to invent new techniques”. Born in Westphalia, Germany, she studied at the Art academies in Dresden and Berlin and holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the University of Arts in Berlin, Germany. In Berlin, Isolde Kille was involved in several independent art initiatives, including ‘241’, an art magazine that helped the launch of Kille’s career, gaining on her the attention of galleries, collectors and curators in Germany. Most notable, ‘241’ brought Kille into a dialogue with the international art community and inspired her to travel to New York. Feeling more creatively liberated in the United States, in 1998 Kille made New York her home, and embarked on a productive period that would mark her maturation as an artist. In 2020 she created the online art channel Timespecific featuring international artists investigating the practice of art-making in the natural setting of their environments. TIMESPECIFIC is an artist-driven experiment initiated by the artist at the beginning of March 2020 during the time of the international pandemic. Artists are invited to submit works and artistic interventions that reflect our current conditions in order to establish a visual memory in time and examine interactive processes to share artworks and the artistic process online.

Randee Silv talks with Isolde Kille


After I was introduced to TIMESPECIFIC by a video artist friend, my curiosity was definitely stirred. What you’ve written on your information page is very alluring. “TIMESPECIFIC features and documents works that are often unable to be framed, boxed, copied, packaged and sold,” and that it is “A message system. Documenting the in between as a constant. The history of objects, quasa object, non-objects, hyper realities … . Experimentation is mantra!” Can you talk about the roots of your thinking and what you’re envisioning?

During the three month artist residency at GlogauAIR, Kille created an environmental installation, collapsing analog and digital realities into an experience that connects to an intuitive feeling rather the reading of context.


In her work, Kille moves along the shifting line between the random and the structured, revealing different facets of my preoccupation with the powers and handicaps of perception. From two-dimensional works such as painting and photography to sculptural mirror works and film/video, Isolde works with a variety of techniques to make visible not only the constructed nature of imagery but also the potential to change them. Each of these works has a secret twist. The tension between what we initially notice and what is actually there resonating through our encounter.

Barbed Magazine features the series 'Into the Woods'. Similar to a Rohrschach test, INTO THE WOODS is mirroring photographic close up shots from my recent visit (2/16) to the Red Woods near San Francisco, California.

The Island Series are Isolde Kille’s first ‘Earth Capsules’ trapping Earth as well as Pigments and Oil paint in-between Glass and Canvas.


In 2012 the Artist re-located her studio from New York City to Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the foothills of Rocky Mountains, her canvases are often lined up on the ground and influenced by elements of Nature. Characterized by a relentlessly experimental and inquisitive approach to a wide variety of styles and subject matter, Isolde Kille's work engages unconventional materials and techniques, playfully provoking Alchemy of Nature.


The collective unconscious is common to all: it is the foundation of what the ancients called the sympathy of all things. It is through the medium of the collective unconscious that information about a particular time and place can be transferred to another individual mind.”


Blue is the color of the oceans of Marshall Islands, a collection of volcanic rings called atolls, made of tiny islands surrounded by oceans that are thousands of feet deep. A paradise with fisherman, the culture destroyed by nuclear tests during the cold war, with radioactive contamination, and jellyfish babies... Now there is another imminent catastrophe. The islands will disappear from the rising water levels of global warming and so the radiation waste will disappear, another form of Alchemy – do we understand the consequences of our actions?


The Island Series are Earth Capsules for the future, a reminder of our blue oceans. The pigments are sandwiched between Glass and Canvas. The glass is reflecting the viewer like a mirror, the viewer when stepping closer will be a part in the reflection of the image. A reminder we are a part of Nature!

Abstract photographic series on black and white fiber paper which Kille created during an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center.


RAYOGRAM: From the name of Man Ray + -o- + -gram, after French rayogramme. The name Rayogram was heard first on the mountain, Mont Parnasse, a quarter of Paris on the left banc of the Seine, where artists and poets used to gather and recite their poems in public. Parnasse, according to Greek Mythology was a sacred mountain, it was the home of the Muses.