Dance Rehearsal:

Karen Kilimnik’s World of Ballet and Theatre

Dance Rehearsal: Karen Kilimnik’s World of Ballet and Theatre was dedicated to internationally acclaimed American artist Karen Kilimnik’s longstanding engagement with historical theatre, in particular, the Classical and Romantic story ballets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Emerging in the late 1980s, Kilimnik is a key figure in contemporary art whose work in media ranging from traditional painting to video and live performance has reinvigorated and expanded the lexicon of narrative figuration. She first became known for vignette-littered drawings and sprawling theatrical installation works that reimagine historical figures and times and parallel contemporary pop culture. The theatrical has always loomed large in Kilimnik’s work. Historical theatres and stage sets, story ballets and operas as well as famous dancers, pop stars, and actors make repeat appearances across widely varying mediums. Archetypal themes drawn from Swan Lake and other legendary works—often spliced with present-day dramas found on-screen and in the news—play out in the artist’s narratives and iconography.

Kilimnik’s consuming drive to repeatedly re-envision certain plot lines, images, and motifs relates to the ever-evolving, self-referential nature of the performing arts with its endless variations, renditions, and remakes. Dance Rehearsal featured works from 1988 to the present, encompassing all the notoriously diverse styles and mediums in which Kilimnik has worked—from figurative drawing and painting to mixed media mise-en-scène installations, collage, photography, and video, as well as more recent forays into set and costume design and choreography.

Karen Kilimnik was born in 1955 in Philadelphia, where she currently lives and works. She attended Temple University, Philadelphia and mounted her first solo show in 1991 at 303 Gallery, New York.