Period Eye: Karen Kilimnik's Fancy Pictures

Art history becomes Karen Kilimnik. As much as paint on canvas, it is the raw material of her pictures--though she wears it lightly, and with great elan. The title of this mini exhibition catalogue, published on the occasion of Kilimnik's show at London's Serpentine Gallery, derives from a popular sub-genre populated by "link boys" and "cottage girls." For when looking at Kilimnik's work since the late 1980s, and especially that of the last 10 years, one cannot help but be struck by her engagement with the history of painting. In this lightly illustrated volume, Meredith Martin, a scholar of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art, speaks with Scott Rothkopf on Kilimnik's relationship to art history: if history is her raw material, then Kilimnik points as much to painting's future as its past, as much to our own world as to a bygone day.