Kim Krans is an artist, author, and the creator of The New York Times bestseller The Wild Unknown Tarot, as well as other successful illustrated books. She began her creative career as a visual artist, making large-scale sculptures and works on paper through her mid-twenties, before expanding her practice to a broader more commercial audience. Incorporating plaster, wire, and cement, and elaborately layering materials such as acrylic, spray paint, ink, gouache, wood, plaster, fur, glitter, glue, and pebbles, she creates surreal landscape interpretations. Both her sculptures and drawings emphasize the relationship between the two-dimensional and three-dimensional world, questioning the illusionary space within a drawing, and the real, bodily space the sculptural works occupy.
The artist often deals with the distillation of memories whether experienced or imagined as they relate to the construction of our psychological engagement with nature and landscape. She uses the language of romanticism – forging color, light, and luscious materials in an effort that is simultaneously emotional and skeptical. The work reminds us that the sublimity of nature as an aesthetically and emotionally transformative experience is also a social construct. She has continued this work in her visually arresting publications.
SmartSpaces installed Kirk’s Three Dark Stumps (2006) and Golden Pair (2007) in the Regeneration exhibition in the windows of 88 Greenwich Street in downtown Manhattan.
Krans was born and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and received her BFA in drawing at Cooper Union in NYC, an MFA in mixed media at Hunter College, NYC, and an MA in depth psychology and creativity at Pacifica Graduate Institute, California. Her artwork was shown in several well-known galleries including D’Amelio Terras, NYC, Feigen Contemporary, NYC; Guild & Greyshkul, NYC; and Spencer Brownstone Gallery, NYC. The artist lives and works in Portland, OR.
- Project: Regeneration
- Artist Website: www.kimkrans.com