Kolja Kärtner Sainz

Kolja Kärtner Sainz (b. 1998, Mannheim) is a German artist based in Leipzig, where he studied photography and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB). His practice explores the unstable territory between abstraction and figuration, treating painting as an open system in which images continually emerge, dissolve and reorganise themselves.

Working primarily with oil and ink, Kärtner Sainz builds his paintings through an iterative process of layering, staining and drawing. Lines, translucent fields and sweeping gestures overlap to create network-like topographies that can suggest organic structures, landscapes, bodily fragments or technological forms without settling into any single reading. Across the work, biological and artificial qualities frequently seem to merge, producing spaces that feel simultaneously familiar and speculative.

Memory and perception play an important role in this process. Rather than working from preparatory images, Kärtner Sainz has described drawing on remembered observations—from nature, architecture and everyday visual culture—allowing forms to become altered through recollection. His paintings consequently resist fixed symbols or narratives; each gesture functions instead as part of a shifting visual language in which traces of different moments remain embedded within the surface.

Recent solo exhibitions include Dear Painting, at Galerie Lætitia Gorsy, Leipzig (2026), Hypernode at Tabula Rasa Gallery, London (2024), and Perpetuum at DS Galerie, Paris (2023). His work has also been exhibited internationally in Berlin, Beijing, Guadalajara, Los Angeles, Luxembourg, New York, Paris and Seoul.