Christina Kruse on Purple Diary

From Purple Diary:



Christina Kruse’s New York solo show

Christina Kruse is perhaps best known for her work as an international supermodel throughout the nineties. This exhibition launches the publication of Reisebuch 1-5, Kruse’s limited edition artist’s book, and will feature other significant recent work by Kruse including photographs, photo collages illuminated in watercolor and other media, and a series of photograms.

Text and photo by Gavin Doyle

At Steven Kashner Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street 2nd Floor New York, NY 10011 through March 28th, 2009.

Check out Christina Kruse in Purple Naked, Purple Fashion magazine #11

Christina Kruse in the New York Times

Source The New York Times Sunday, March 8th



Having spent too much time idling in hotel rooms, Christina Kruse, the hauntingly beautiful German model, decided in the mid-’90s to take up a hobby. So she bought a Mamiya camera and became her own guinea pig, dressing up as different characters and posing for herself. Then she began gluing the photos into travel journals (or “Reisebuchs,” as she calls them) and creating intricate collages that elegantly combined gouache and newsprint, colored tape and metallic paper. “They became like a language I had with myself,” she said.

Nowadays, Ms. Kruse has a studio in Brooklyn and a costume closet the size of a small bedroom. Her photos have been published in Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar and Interview; and last week, her first solo show in the United States opened at Steven Kasher Gallery in Chelsea. On view is a range of evocative, often amusing self-portraits and collages, as well as “Reisebuch 1-5,” her limited-edition artist’s book, painstakingly self-published in Germany. So much for free time. As she noted, “It took forever to do them.”

Christina Kruse on Style.Com

A model taking pictures of herself? That may sound like a project born of narcissism, but in the case of model-photographer Christina Kruse, something like the opposite was in effect. Back when she began shooting self-portrait Polaroids in 1996, Cruse explains her motives were more practical. “I was trying to teach myself how to take pictures,” she said. “And I was traveling a lot at the time, so it seemed like I was the most convenient subject.” Eventually, it struck Kruse that she was compiling a kind of visual travel journal, and she began to collect her images and play on them for a series of books that also comprise her collages and drawings.

This evening, she opens her first show of these works at the Steven Kasher Gallery in west Chelsea, an event that also marks the launch of Kruse’s Reisebuch 1-5. “Reisebuch means travel book in German,” she says. “I’ve selected images from the five books I made over the years and put them together in one, more formal book.” Though she had offers from two publishing houses, Kruse has elected to publish the books herself—fitting, given that she’s kept her art and photography a relatively private project.

“I really only picked up the camera because I was at the point in my modeling career where I was starting to think, this will end soon, so what next?” she recalls. “I didn’t show anything to anyone for a long time. But I think that’s good. Doing things by myself meant that I didn’t just teach myself to take pictures, but that I also got to teach myself how to see.”

—Maya Singer

Christina Kruse - Interview Magazine interview

Interview Magazine interviewed Christina Kruse about her creative process and day-to-day routine:


August and Christina at the circus

Christina Kruse has been on and off the runways in recent seasons, but she's been full-time in the darkroom. Kruse has taken photographs since 1996, when she picked it up from her boyfriend at the time, who was a photographer. Since then she's self taught herself to shoot film, using the same Mamiya RZ 6x7 for the past 13 years. On the occasion of her recent series of self-portaits and collages at Steven Kasher Gallery, which opened last week but whose reception is March 5, we asked the muse-cum-maker to jot down some notes about her day to day.

On a typical day...
I live in Chelsea. In the morning I like to have a cup of tea and smoke a cigarette by the window before my son August wakes up. On a typical day I get up at 7 AM, leave the house at 9 to go to my studio in Brooklyn, and head back to Manhattan by 4:15 PM to pick up August from school. I go home and make (or order) dinner for us, and put him to bed. Either I wait for babysitter in order to go meet friends or stay at home. Not that exciting... even though the occasional trip come up or a modeling job and that is a welcome break but honestly after all these years traveling I kind of like the "routine." Today was not so much different.

On what caught her eye...
I saw a woman wearing pink sweatpants, a fur jacket, sneakers, and a mask for construction workers—complemented by insane amounts of orange blush and eye make up .

On preparation for her show at Steven Kasher Gallery, and catharsis...
I had only a few weeks to prepare, so I just did it. At the end when everything went to the framers I sat down asking myself, "What did I just do..?" That's a good sign.

On being a model, for others and for herself...
The portraits have been mostly self-portraits due to me being alone or on planes, travels—or primarily, not feeling comfortable asking people to sit for me. In the past I always felt pressure that a sitter wanted to be made to look good. And God forbid if they didn't like it. It was easiest to use myself: I didn't have any of that, and I could do whatever I want. This has changed but the books will always be self-portraits. It's its own on-going project.

Do I feel like I posses my image?
Not at all: When I do my stuff I never think about that. It's me and it's irrelevant physically speaking. When I am being photographed it looks more like the "me" I know from photos that people would respond to. In my own work I don't care what what I look like, as long as it makes my intended idea clear. It is beside the point.

Christina Kruse is on view at Steven Kasher Gallery through March 28. Steven Kasher is located at 521 West 23 St., Second Floor. The reception is March 5, 6–8 PM.

Christina Kruse Exhibition opens today at Steven Kashner Gallery