ANDREA KRUPP

Andrea Krupp

Artist Statement

AK snow herhus

These works on paper were created during a residency in North Iceland, late in the winter of 2020. A series of epic snowstorms piled up snow like a fortress around the studio, and I enjoyed a long, uninterrupted period of quiet, inward-turned work. The spell broke in mid-March, in a hectic scramble to return home to Philadelphia on one of the last flights out of Reykjavik, by way of Boston, because EWR and JFK had closed.

These images trace a period of creative research that synthesizes historic references to Pennsylvania anthracite, and injects re-imagined meaning to the way we read the past and think about the future. Anthracite has a lot to say about the looping nature of time, it is a material present and in process in multiple dimensions.

In the Herhus studio I listened to Alec Guinness read TS ELIOT Four Quartets over and over. I listened to Zola’s Germinal. I watched the snow fall and I shoveled snow. I read about Icelandic turf-house traditions, and studied the archaeological tracings of the structures’ Earth-rooted forms. I imagined the bulk of the turf houses speaking with the voids in the underground anthracite mines, as if space and time did not matter.

About the Artist

Andrea Krupp is a visual artist whose work explores the meaning and implications of human/nature entanglement. Her works on paper use graphic, historic and poetic languages to open new ways of seeing and understanding the world. She is currently exploring Pennsylvania anthracite coal as a material that can help us recalibrate our connection with nature, place and time.
A Philadelphian, she graduated from the University of the Arts and holds a BFA with honors in Printmaking. In 2017 she was awarded the Independence Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship. In 2018 she attended the Arctic Circle Residency and was a Ballinglen Fellow. Her drawings, paintings, books and works on paper have been exhibited nationally and abroad in solo and juried group shows. Her works are in several University collections, the Free Library of Philadelphia and Woodmere Art Museum.

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