About #
Karl von Orb is an artist based in Berlin, working with objects, images, and spatial situations drawn from familiar functional and cultural contexts. His practice mainly relies on subtle displacements that render familiar structures quietly unstable.
He studied philosophy, German literature, and medieval and modern history at Johann Wolfgang Goethe University in Frankfurt am Main, engaging with questions at the intersection of semiotics, aesthetics, and visual culture throughout his studies. His artistic education began at the Akademie für Malerei Berlin, followed by specialized training in classical atelier practice with Sadie J. Valeri.
Artist Statement #
I work with object-based constellations drawn from familiar systems of everyday use. These elements carry functional, cultural, and procedural expectations. Through subtle displacements, substitutions, and re-orderings, they enter relations that remain formally plausible while becoming internally unstable.
The works often present themselves as controlled and operational entities, offering a surface of coherence and reliability. Yet this coherence begins to falter: functions remain legible but no longer align with their conditions. Rather than collapsing into dysfunction, they continue to operate under the wrong premises, producing quiet tensions between use, meaning, and material presence.
Repetition, measurement, seriality, and procedural constraint serve as structuring principles. Frameworks that initially suggest clarity gradually reveal strain, vulnerability, or latent absurdity. What appears rational or harmless tilts through minimal shifts, allowing internal contradictions to surface without rupture or spectacle.
Humor emerges as a by-product of precise misalignment. The works oscillate between familiarity and unease, accessibility and threat, remaining visually restrained while resisting stable classification or immediate interpretation.
While grounded in discrete objects, the practice increasingly unfolds in relation to space. Installations extend object-based thinking into spatial situations that activate bodily presence, duration, and attention. Meaning arises through sustained encounter and the viewer’s negotiation of proximity, scale, and expectation.
Alongside realized works, my practice includes speculative proposals developed as renderings or spatial propositions. Across different formats, the work focuses on moments in which established structures remain intact yet lose their self-evidence, holding these conditions open rather than resolving them.
Practice #
Proposal-driven practice across objects and spatial constellations.