I never promised you a rose garden

Karolin Klüppel (*1985 in Kassel) is characterized by a deliberate arrangement of the various people and places. Like a director or screenwriter Karolin Klüppel builds the idea behind the image and uses a type of photography, whose content is deliberately constructed prior the recording. In the series, „I never promised you a rose garden, which has arisen in the context of this year's final exsame, she sets naked young men in the limelight of natural surroundings, lying on a tree trunk, gazing dreamily into the water, lost in thought between the vernal blooming fruit trees or standing peeing like a "Petit Julien" ("Manneken Pis") in a lonely, romantic lake. The portraited nudes are not mainly characterised by their individual sexual attributes of young man, but more by their poses and gestures, which show the artist twisting of typical gender roles. The composition and topic references are drawn from pre-images of similare genres. Because not just the classically composed image, but also the protagonist as illuminated, bright like objects are borrowed from the mythology of naked young men in the painting of Caravaggio or Caracci. They bring back memories of the naked Cupid, or the in water reflecting Narcissus, who in this case is like the figure of Leda surrounded by swans and bows over the dark water surface. Nevertheless in this case the staging of the "boys" happens in a contemporary context and medium. Karolin Klüppel twists the roles of gender and relationships, mixes them and thereby questions the stereotypes of gender roles.
Added to this is also another apsect, taking place outside of the visual dimension of her work: contrary to the traditional depiction of the female nude, which was produced in the history of art mostly by the male artist, and was mainly exposed to the male gaze, stands in this case behind this sexualized male image as a creator a woman.
In Karolin Klüppels images, it is not only about the relation of image to external reality, the reflection on gender roles and their transformation, but also to the „interpikturellen“ reference, so the discourse of the pictures, in which new medias pose new tendences and questions. Her photographs do not only question the familiar structures of perception and stereotypes, but also succeeds an ironic revaluation and updating of certain motifs, which are transported into the present and with the distance to tradition she captures, in an amusing manner the nature of the human condition of the presence.