Petra von Kazinyan, Artist (Repost)

 

Hello! In honor of The Big Clouds, Petra von Kazinyan's new exhibition at Art Circle Wien in Vienna, Austria, I am reposting my November 2020 interview with Petra with some updated photos. It was in the middle of the pandemic and things were weird but her answers were great and also comforting. (All photos courtesy of the artist / Instagram: @petravonkazinyan / Website: www.petravonkazinyan.com)

 

Jackson: What inspired you to make art? Did you have a specific experience?

Petra: Since my early childhood, I had the desire to transform my life into art. I was never not painting or drawing. When I was six years old, I started to sign my works; the first one I ever signed was a small landscape painting, a forest scene. Funnily I wrote my age not my name in the bottom right hand corner....

So to me, art is all about self-expression, coping with reality - it's just something that has always been there and can't be separated from my inner self. Like Christo once said: When you're an artist, you're always an artist, there's not one second in your life when you are not an artist.

Jackson: Has the global pandemic changed your art or your art career? I had some things cancelled or postponed. I think it might be different there in Europe than it is here in the United States.

Petra: It was (and still is) the same here due to the coronavirus, I also had to postpone a planned solo show to next year. A group show in Venice, Italy fortunately happened to take place, under strict measures for protection and hygiene. 

And to sum up my feelings in 2020 so far: being an artist, self-isolation is nothing new to me; nevertheless, I felt different during the lockdown because it is something else to choose isolation of your own free will. So being told to stay in for public reasons was kind of a new experience - and it was a very interesting, highly creative one.

Jackson: If you could meet any artist living or dead, who would it be and why?

Petra: Lucio Fontana. I'd love to have a philosophical discussion with him about the concept of space in art. What the terms "space" and "place" mean today, in our liquid modernity as Zygmunt Bauman once called it - in a globalized and digital world where the only constant is change.