Katharina Dustmann - Biography
Katharina Dustmann is an interdisciplinary artist who combines painting, photography and design with musical elements. She began her artistic career as a musician and composer before focusing more on the visual fine arts.
Art and interdisciplinary projects
Since the 1990s, she has composed music for installations, film and theater and directed sound art projects for institutions such as Landesgartenschau, Euroga, die Pinakothek der Moderne, I, das Gasometer Oberhausen und die UNESCO. Her spatially dynamic compositions have been used for more than 30 multimedia productions, including the 800-meter surround installation Illumina, which won the EVA Award in silver.
In 2018, she began the series Klangbilder/Sound of Colors, in which she combined her paintings and music to create a new synaesthetic art form. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including New York, Miami, Venedig, Zürich, Bologna, Lissabon und China. In 2023 she received the TERAVARNA Award and a recommendation from the Pinakothek der Moderne.
As a synesthete, she perceives images, colours and sounds not in isolation, but as interconnected sensory impressions. This synesthetic perception forms the basis of her artistic approach and is closely linked to her experience in music, poetry and sound art – compositional thinking, tonal perception and visual intuition intertwine. The artistic process remains open to chance and change, but always leads to a precise, independent visual language.
In her current series of works, ‘Where the Light Lives in Water,’ the element of water takes centre stage.
Her works are based on photographs of structures that appear only briefly in the interplay of light, movement and reflection on the water's surface. The artist transforms these visual impressions in a multi-layered working process and transfers them onto brushed metal. The surfaces are then further treated with pigments, ink and paint.
