KATHRIN RAAB-QUESTENBERG

Kathrin Raab-Questenberg was born in 1966 in Vienna, Austria. Raised in the generative substrate of a long-line of Austrian artists and artisans, she began from a young age to probe an innate and prodigious fascination with the revelatory aspects of art. Particularly infatuated with the dynamic of spiritual insight found at the nexus of vision and mind, she spent her first years assiduously collecting and synthesizing the artistic skills necessary to probe that nexus. To this end she plumbed a catholic range of study that would adequately flex and tune her senses, fields including drawing, photography, sculpture, horticulture, mathematics, language and religion. Though wary of the often closed-loop influence of artistic orthodoxy, she soon recognized an affinity for Jungian themes, specifically those adumbrated in the perspective that art channels truth no less powerfully than science, that in Jung's words “hands will solve a mystery that the intellect has struggled with in vain.” Jungian insights on the group subconscious thus play a potent role in her art, as does the tense existential vein of artistic transmission explored in the paintings of El Greco, Oskar Kokoschka and Erich Katzmann and in the sculptures of Alberto Giacometti, Karl Hartung and Wander Bertoni. Kathrin graduated from the Sigmund Freud Academy of Vienna, then traveled to the United States to pursue a graduate degree at the University of California at Davis. She currently resides in the Santa Monica mountains near Los Angeles with her husband, writer Charles Questenberg, and their three sons.