Katinka Matson: White Flowers

[EDITOR'S NOTE: Each Saturday, Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the largest newspapers in Germany, dedicates their last Feuilleton page to a work of art (unknown, unseen, long lost or specially made). The page, called “Grossformat” (large format), has included contributions from artists and estates ranging from Barbara Kruger to August Sander, Sun Ra, and Gerhard Richter. Peony 2016, by Edge co-founder and resident artist Katinka Matson, was the photograph selected to run over the Easter weekend, the edition with by far highest circulation of the year. The work is part of her current Los Angeles show, "White Flowers" at the Eric Buterbaugh Gallery. Her work Peony 2016 is in the "Featured Artists" section of artsy.net.]

True Stem and True Flowering
By Andrian Kreye March 31, 2018

Rarely do flowers shine so strongly as in the photography of the artist Katinka Matson who uses flatbed scanners, avoiding the fuzziness with which cameras map reality.

Coincidences are the key moments in the history of science (the discovery of gravity, penicillin, X-rays, Teflon pans). They are more deliberate in art (Jackson Pollock, Yayoi Kusama, John Cage). Because New Yorker Katinka Matson works on the border between art and science, it seems consistent that her work began with such a lucky mishap. That occurred some 15 years ago, when she put some flowers on a flatbed scanner in her office and pressed the start button. The flowers were crushed. The result was nevertheless startling. Because scanners do not capture points of light through a lens like cameras, but scan them pixel by pixel, the images had a sharpness and luminosity she'd never seen before. The extreme clarity of images was especially unique. Human's visual perception has incorporated the distortions and blurring of camera lenses when looking at printed or filmed reality. In Katinka Matson's work those distortions are mostly absent. The science historian George Dyson described the effect: "Vision evolved to attract insects, and by removing the lens Katinka has taken us back to this direct connection between the flower and the deepest layers of the visual brain. And that makes it so amazing."