Annika Koops: Frame Break

Frame Break’ employs illusionistic painting to reflect on the dissolution of shared frames of reference associated with algorithmic cultures. On digital screens, images are detached from their referents and their effects mutate and ripple through lifeworlds. Koops’ new paintings stage this breach between image and world, toggling between figuration and abstraction, gesture and facture. Painterly motifs appear and then repeat, performing uncanny versions of themselves with the slapstick exertion of a stunt double. 

The title references both the trick form of trompe l’oeil painting and the actions of the workers associated with the Luddite movement of 19th-century England, who destroyed the stocking frame machines made to replace them. Koops’s new paintings invite playful sociality and seek to reanimate the possibilities of shared sense-making when existing frames of reference are so rapidly collapsing. 

These paintings involve re-staging gestures and compositional elements through digital simulations and animation techniques before they are returned to the painting surface. I developed this method through my ongoing series ‘Double Binds’. Re-staging my own embodied gestures is a way to diagnose and undermine the logics of capture. These paintings chart contradictions and wormholes, not toward endless equivocating, but to forge space for expanded knowing that can hold contradictory registers of meaning together at once. These works materially consider how one might break, subvert, or move within a profoundly and intentionally disorienting techno sphere to touch upon common ground.

- Annika Koops, 2025

view past exhibitions by Annika Koops