Crack in the Real, VAN HORN, DÜSSELDORF, GERMANY 

November 9 - December 21, 2013

"Crack in the Real" presents a series of large-scale drawings in which Holten explores how the structures of humanity are interwoven with the natural world. In hommage to the Eames film ‘Power of Ten’, the drawings zoom from the macroscopic world of her on-going ‘city’ drawings, through clouds captured on Google maps and flocks of birds, to the microscopic world of man-made growths, mould and bits of data.

"I’m drawn to the macro and micro view of things—self-similar patterns found on different scales. The shape of river deltas is found to repeat at scales all the way down to cracks in the mud. We see this in man-made as well as organic structures—a simple underlying mathematics to it all." –Katie Holten, Artforum, July 2012.

Fascinated by the power of drawing to simultaneously describe our individual, self-created worlds, and to map the vastness of human civilisation, Holten embraces drawing to create personal psycho-geographies. Holten sees science as an index of social history and power relations and imagines a parallel present, a fictional topography realised through line.