Karin Schneider

Karin Schneider (b.1970) is a Brazilian artist. She was born in Rio de Janeiro. Between 1987 and 1991, she was educated in the UNB (Universidade de Brasilia), Brasilia, the Circulo de Bellas Artes, Madrid and the UFRG (Universidade do Rio Grande do Sul), Rio Grande do Sul. She then continued her education at New York University from 1996 to 1998.

In her first body of work, from 1989 to 1996, she explored sculpture. From 1996 to 2001 she worked with video, film, drawing and photography. From 2001 on she started to work with architecture. Her later work involves installations with oil paintings.

Schneider lives and works in New York since October, 1996. She married in 1999 with Nicolas Guagnini. In 1997, they created together an experimental film company called Union Gaucha Productions. Their first film "Phantom Limb" made in 1997 is a 30 minutes 16mm fictional documentary that traces through formal analogies the history of Concrete Art from Argentina and Brazil, Neoconcretism from Brazil and Unicism from Poland. The film was showed for the first time inside a film theater designed by the artists at Artist Space in New York,1999.

Schneider's’ work has a strong play impulse and invites the audience to invert the logic of the art object bringing functionality to it. Her architecture models were transformed critically into domestic apparatus, her oil paintings became exhibition displays for projections. There is always a program inserted in her installations in order to connect the work with the present tense and with the reality outside the exhibition space. Her art installation “ two or three things you should” at Sculpture Center, New York, 2007 was an example of her installations/machines to create parallel realities that can be experienced simultaneously.