New General Catalog is pleased to present Gothicolor, Kristen Schiele’s first solo exhibition in Greenpoint Brooklyn. Schiele’s luminous paintings are of environments that dissect a power structure underlying our society physically and psychologically. Recounting lives of alienation beamed through TV sets, her dark and vibrant, saturated canvases are set in hotel lobbies, ski and hunting lodges, back yard nights, and Midwestern living rooms. They divulge a subtext of role-playing, what it means to be a part of it, what it means to challenge it.

Having lived in both the United States and Germany, Kristen Schiele’s inspiration comes from the industrial landscapes of the Midwest and post-war, East Berlin. Her working method of numerous paint layers directly relates to cinema, graphic novel storytelling, Victorian stage sets, and stop-animation cells that choreograph space and time. The use of architecture is thus a record and reconstruction of our economic, ideological, and societal states-of-being that reluctantly maintain order at the same time that it is seemingly unable to contain it.

Kristen Schiele received an MFA degree from American University in Washington DC. She most recently had a solo exhibition at Curators without Borders in Berlin, and has received awards from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Bronx Museum of the Arts, Chasama, and Goethe Institute.