Kirstine Roepstorff was born in Copenhagen in 1972. She trained at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts before completing her MFA in 2000 at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Her expansive exhibition profile includes solo shows at museums such as Kunstmuseum Basel, Galerie im Taxispalais, Kunsthalle Brandts, and MUSAC, Spain. She currently lives and works in Berlin. Roepstorff’s collages and sculptures are characterized by their unrefined physicality, which translates conceptual information networks into the palpable realm of ‘stuff’: textiles, crumpled foil, wall paper, magazine clippings, bits of random bijoux compile as fantastical scenes or prop-like objects that construct suggestive narratives. Her work, which also includes performance and theatre production, relates to a concept of ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ or ‘total artwork’, which binds aesthetics to the social, political, and spiritual values intrinsic to everyday life.
Kirstine Roepstorff creates collages of media images that visualize existing power relations and critically deals with the history of political ideas, including their failure. She simultaneously reorders what exists and develops interrelations between themes such as loss, excess, progress, growth, and capitalism. Editing and rearranging the original material generates new contexts that opens up spaces for negotiation and new narratives.
In recent times she applied the principle of collage as a method of reflection and reference on curating group shows such as “Scorpio´s Garden” (Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin, Germany, 2009) and “Dried Dew Drops: Wunderkammer of Formlessness” (Kunstmuseum Basel, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Switzerland, 2010).
Recent solo exhibitions include “Kirstine Roepstorff. Wunderkammer of Formlessness” at Museum of Contemporary Art, The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway; “Illuminating Shadows” at Peres Projects in Berlin (2010); The Inner Sound that Kills the Outer at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leon, Spain (2009); The End Was Yesterday at Kunstraum Innsbruch + Galerie in Switzerland and at the Autocenter + Galerie im Regierungsviertel in Berlin (2008); and It’s Not the Eye of the Needle That Changed–The Time at the Drawing Center in New York City (2007). Selected group exhibitions include Personal Protocols and Other Preferences at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2008); The Triumph of Painting: Germania at the Saatchi Gallery, London (2008); Fit to print at the Gagosian Gallery, New York (2007); and Fantastic Politics at The National Museum of Art, Oslo (2006).
Kirstine Roepstorff is represented by Peres Project in Berlin and the Galleri Christina Wilson in Copenhagen. She lives and works in Berlin.