Amelie Karweick

The white light source of a scanner moves steadily beneath a glass plate, illuminating the surface of an object line by line. The reflected light is captured by a sensor and translated into digital information—every shift in brightness, every irregularity of the object is mapped. The scanner is an instrument of precision, but also of estrangement: It recognizes no perspective, no depth, only the accumulation of light values across a surface.

In Amelie Karweick’s drawings, this technical process appears to assume a pictorial form. Her monochrome works recall scanned reliefs—layers of graphite and clay built up on paper. She forgoes clear figuration or referential codes. Forms are not defined by contour or boundary, but by finely modulated, almost photographic gradations of tone. At the same time, the act of drawing remains perceptible: concentrations and dissolutions, the play between pressure and release in the movement of the hand. Karweick’s drawings evoke a sense of topographic mapping—fragmented landscapes, tectonic shifts, and remnants of a material world whose spatial coherence can only be inferred. In this tension between analytical precision and tactile perception, a distinct materiality emerges: an image space formed not out of depth, but from the surface itself.

In this reduction lies a pointed reflection on the conditions of image-making itself: How does form take shape through the successive acts of seeing and drawing? Where does the image begin when perspective and narrative are withdrawn? Karweick’s works operate within parameters akin to those of the scanner—yet where the scanner generates data with technical detachment, Karweick leaves behind a trace that is irrevocably human.

– Arthur Schouler