"I see the world as translucent, transparent shimmering light, constantly changing like clouds, echoes, and rainbows. Isn’t the world as we perceive it only made of our minds?"
— Pia Dehne
Through painting, photography, performance, sculpture and drawing, Pia Dehne has spent decades exploring the space that exists between concealment and revelation, and the tensions and curiosities that lie within. Shifting and contorting perceptions of reality, Dehne presents images, identities and objects that are in a state of becoming or metamorphosis, where categorization and identification can only ever be hinted at or vaguely perceived. Exploring themes of mimesis, reappropriation, mimicry, illusion and camouflage, her work is inimitable and compelling, and centers on the phenomenology of images.
Referencing historical paintings, moments or figures in sub or pop culture, issues surrounding female corporeality, conspiratorial beliefs, violence in modern society, or the phantasmagoric, Dehne twists, turns and subverts their ontologies and representations. Dehne reshapes vantage points, or entirely strips her canvases of traditional spatial practices, or oscillates between what is in and out of focus, as she visually mirrors her thematic pursuits. Her paintings are rich cornucopias of sensation and chromatic revelry, and they give rise to new perceptions each time they are viewed.
Pia Dehne was born in Düsseldorf, Germany and received her MFA from the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf. Exhibitions of her work have been mounted at Deitch Projects, Haswellediger & Co. Gallery, Blackston Gallery, Charles Bank Gallery, Achim Kubinski Gallery and AJL Gallery. She has participated in group shows at some of the following galleries, White Columns, Salomon Contemporary, Eric Firestone, Mishkin Gallery, Bushel, Delhi NY and Johan König Gallery in Berlin, Germany. Dehne lives and works in the Catskills, New York.
