At first glance, Karin van Dam’s overwhelming, room-filling installations are a chaotic universe. You get to know them as you would an unfamiliar city, which you have to make your own by wandering around in it and absorbing your surroundings. This publication coincides with an exhibition in The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum and offers a first overview of her work.

Dutch graphic and installation artist Karin van Dam (b. 1959, Eindhoven) creates full-scale art environments, each referring to a city or a world of its own. In creating her work Van Dam draws inspiration from the legendary novella Invisible Cities, in which Italo Calvino has globetrotter Marco Polo describe imaginary cities.

At first glance, Karin van Dam’s overwhelming, room-filling installations are a chaotic universe. You get to know them as you would an unfamiliar city, which you have to make your own by wandering around in it and absorbing your surroundings. This publication coincides with an exhibition in The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum and offers a first overview of her work.

Dutch graphic and installation artist Karin van Dam (b. 1959, Eindhoven) creates full-scale art environments, each referring to a city or a world of its own. In creating her work Van Dam draws inspiration from the legendary novella Invisible Cities, in which Italo Calvino has globetrotter Marco Polo describe imaginary cities.

Karin van Dam herself is a traveller, constantly on a journey of exploration. She happens upon her (building) materials by chance: tubes, slabs of rubber, drainage pipes, cylinders and all sorts of connecting elements, which form the palette of a new temporary installation she constructs in an unusual place, in a museum, but also on the roof of a building or on a street corner.