Magritte’s work often explored the gulf between the physical body and the consciousness within it, and the vividly colored paintings of Kristen Sanders operate in a similar psychological space, reframing it for an era in which artificial intelligence is quickly becoming a reality. The world she conjures is one of mystery and uncertainty—a kind of fever dream in which past and future, human and mechanical, have merged, and the viewer is never sure exactly what they are seeing.
A sense of Magrittean surrealism pervades her work. In Stone/Shift (2023), the face of a humanoid robot is obscured by a piece of sheer silk, while in Body Thing (2023) a hand holds a fragment of a human face, its single eye staring helplessly out at the viewer. And A Sense of Reality (2023), in which a piece of flint hovers in mid air against a cloudy sky, makes a direct reference to Magritte’s The Castle of the Pyrenees (1959).