FEUILLETON
SPIDER FLOWERS: Katinka Matson's Scanner Art Fascinates With Intensive Clarity
Andrian Kreye
August 1, 2005

Ever since Marcel Duchamp mounted the front wheel of a bycicle onto a bar stool, the anarchic use of everyday technologies has been part of the standard repertoire of Modern Art. Usually such works question our perception by distorting reality. The flower images by the New York artist Katinka Matson are different for their exactness and completeness: the surreal aura of her pictures come from their enormous clarity. The flowers seem to radiate from the inside and the details are recognizable into the last fiber as though they were being viewed under a magnifying glass.

November 26, 2004

PERSONAL JOURNAL — Time Off — Calendar: Europe's Guide to Leisure & Arts Activity

AMSTERDAM: Van Gogh; BILBOA: Raphael, Michelangelo, da Vinci, FLORENCE: Michelangelo; FRANKFURT: Rembrandt, Gaugin, Degas, Munch; GENOA: Matson; WARSAW: Kandinsky, Chagall.

GENOA / Art / 'Katinka Matson: Flowers' features incredibly lifelike images of lilies and tulips, with every drop of dew and grain of pollen magnified. The works by the American artist aren't photographs, but were created by placing cut flowers on an ordinary office scanner and printing high-resolution images.

Festival della Scienza, Palazzo Rosso; 8 Via Garibaldi; Until Nov. 28.

November 5, 2004

PALAZZO ROSSO Photographic Exhibition of American Artist

The flowers of Katinka Matson "grow" in the computer
by L. Gu

I was struck by the formal quality of the images and I was intrigued by all the implicit connections among the art and sciences that her work is based upon. Katinka's works are reminiscent of the works of Mapplethorpe or of Georgia O'Keeffe. They're also interesting from a botanical point of view because the technique she uses makes visible a lot of details that would be otherwise be hard to grasp." [continue...]

November 4, 2004

Discovered in a digital universe
by Haydn Shaughnessy

One of the highlights of the festival is the first European exhibition of Katinka Matson, an artist working within the digital aesthetic, whose work is attracting attention and praise in the United States...

Joyce, in Finnegans Wake, joined the same attack on language's invisible restraints, more with a sense of accomplishment than with the frustration that isolated Wittgenstein. But Joyce left us no more enlightened. As with Wittgenstein's work, the message of Finnegans Wake is ultimately that we are not sophisticated enough to understand beyond our linguistic rules.

The Katinka Matson exhibition gives a clue as to where we might look for answers today. Matson's exhibits are visually compelling still-lifes, produced not through the physical application of materials (painting, drawing, printing) or photography. [continue...]

pret-a-porter
spring_summer 2005
no. 103 (November 2004)

TECHNOLOGICALLY SCENTED FLOWERS

FLORAL WONDERS
NEW YORK—KATINKA MATSON



"NATURE AS A WORK OF ART"
by Clelia Zanni

Not painted, nor photographed with a digital camera, but simply marvellous. The American artist Katinka Matson uses new technology to create images of suchnatural beauty that they instill the observer with new perceptions...[continue...]

October 30, .2004

Three Exhibitions

In Palazzo Rosso we come across images realized by U.S. artist Katinka Matson: she sets bunches of freshly cut flowers on a special scanner. Thus she manages to create images, with a procedure similar to some extent to Man Ray's gamma rays. In her glossy color "xerox copies" we admire sensuously shaped, almost erotic tulips, peonies and lilies that are reminiscent of Georgia O'Keeffe's paintings. [continue...]

October 28, .2004

Guarda che scienza

Fascinating cosmic numbers

One of the creations of the artist American Katinka Matson: the naturalistic photos of petals, flowers, steles, fungi and other "objects" are exhibited at the Festival.

October 17, .2004

"Science Festival: Twelve days dedicated to the pleasures of knowledge and ingenuity"
by Annik Le Guerer

Twelve days dedicated to the pleasures of knowledge and creativity. This event was all about learning through having fun, and recognising that the new disciplines must become an integral part of culture – and of political and business culture too. Scientific research has nothing static about it; it is based on, and for, continuous change, the constant proposal of concepts and paradigms. This spirit must be recovered by the entire productive system, otherwise it will miss the train of progress.

May 29, 2003

Scan Your Eyes Across This
By Dan Dubno

See CBS News Video & "Photo Essay" on Katinka Matson's Art

Katinka Matson, an amazing digital artist, merging the technological with the botanical in a beautiful way.

This Manhattan-based artist unlocked the simple elegance of nature. Without cameras or special lenses, Katinka Matson captures the unfiltered raw vibrancy of lilies, tulips, and daisies. Closer to painting with nature than to containing and "capturing" it, Ms. Matson’swork is raw, striking, if not shocking. There is honest power in this fusion of technology with n ature and it’s made possible by an inkjet printer and a humble scanner.

December 15, 2002

THE YEAR IN IN IDEAS—2002

Scanner Photography
by Paul Tough

As the moving lens slides along the surface of one of Matson's tulips, it is able to view the flower from all sides; her floral pictures are so intense that looking at them, you almost get the feeling that you are able to peer around the flowers themselves. Another advantage: the distortion that a single lens inevitably creates disappears—details at the corners of these pictures are as sharp and clear as those at the center. [continue...]

17.12.02

Flowers, phtographic art with the scanner

Is there such a thing as an aesthetics of the digital technology, whether hardware or software? Often the answer is affirmative, as when one analyzes the work of Katinka Matson, American artist, who has succeeded in extracting a full poetics from the skilful use of the scanner. Her floral compositions, visible on the site at a decent resolution, show not only petals, stems and pistils but the rhythm and depth that they can express if arranged in a certain position, revealing an identity unsuspected to a naturalistic approach.