Katrin Mates is a painter and graphic designer. Her work is gaining increasing international attention and has already been shown in collections and curated exhibitions.

Her childhood memories of Samarkand—with its unique light, ornamentation, and color palette—form an inner source of her work. From this memory and the tradition of decorative paper making, her light-joint paintings evolve, exploring how light manifests in spaces and becomes visible in flowing traces of color. Using pigments and acrylic paint, she creates multi-layered pictorial spaces on paper and canvas, where color, structure, and layering oscillate between order and dissolution.