Karin Hanssen - Returning the Gaze

‘Perception is central to Hanssen's work - how the figures she selects from old magazines and photographs were once perceived, how we see them today, and how the translation into paint alters them, liberates them. (...) The sense of time, a conflation of past and present, underpins all her work, as does the sense that a woman's role is always conditioned by the society in which she exists.’
Charlotte Mullins, Picturing People (Thames & Hudson, 2015)

'To gaze implies more than to look at - it signifies a psychological relationship of power, in which the gazer is superior to the object of the gaze'
Jonathan Schroeder, Visual Culture  (1998)