KIRSTEN TRADOWSKY and ANNEMARIE’S VISION
Since the day I first saw Kirsten Tradowsky’s paintings two years ago, I have not been able to get these flashes of past lives out of my head. Based on old photographs she found in second-hand shops in San Francisco—or, in the case of the current exhibition, taken by her grandmother, Annemarie—Tradowsky’s paintings are records of memories that litter family photo albums. Whether snapshots of backyard gatherings, birthday parties, or a long-forgotten road trip, all become source material for her reimagining of the moments of our lives, now rendered through the eyes and hand of the painter.
This urge to capture the stuff of daily life has long fascinated artists. Tradowsky mentions as inspirations the French painter of modern life, Edouard Manet, and American artists Edward Hopper and Fairfield Porter. All understood the power of photography to capture how we see the world, yet chose the medium of painting to transform how we experience that reality. The American expat artist John Singer Sargent is also a strong influence on Tradowsky. His painting in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Birthday Party, from 1885, looks as if painted from a modern photograph—casual, off-center, the father lost in the shadows—but it is clearly not. The works of contemporary Swedish artist Mamma Andersson inspire Tradowsky to take her use of thick, expressive paint and a dreamlike sense of nostalgia to another level.
Tradowsky begins with the stark objectivity of a photograph, in most cases, a black-and-white image of people entirely unknown to her. Since she cannot know anything about the photograph’s context, subjects, or the scene’s original colors, she is forced to establish a new perspective. “I like the idea of guessing the narratives,” she says, “even telling another story.” Faces are blurred, edges are imprecise, and backgrounds become a modelled tapestry of paint, color, and brushstrokes. The memory encased in the photograph is transformed into a painting that offers up intrigue or ambiguity, an entirely new storyline.
The paintings in the series “Annemarie’s Vision” generate an additional layer of intimacy in that they capture moments photographed by Tradowsky’s grandmother, many years before the artist herself was born. As in her earlier works, Tradowsky doesn’t know the context of many of these photographs, but because they were mounted in her family’s albums, they tie her directly to Annemarie, her eye as a photographer, an artist, and what she felt was important to archive and remember.
Such are the photos many of us ponder as we try to understand our own family histories, searching the faces and locales for some trace of who are ancestors were. Were they happy or sad, a wall-flower or the life of the party? Addressing this direct relationship to family and memory, Tradowsky makes a profound and tender connection with a grandmother she never met while linking our experience to past lives through the ever-evocative, inventive, and vibrant medium of painting.
Kristin Makholm is an art historian with a BA from Northwestern University and PhD from the University of Minnesota. She was a curator at the Saint Louis Art Museum and Milwaukee Art Museum before becoming gallery director at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Later, she became executive director of the Minnesota Museum of American Art in Saint Paul, where she led its revival in the years prior to the pandemic. She now serves as a nonprofit development professional in the Twin Cities.