Tamara K.E. is a German artist of Georgian origin. Since 1997 she has lived in Düsseldorf, among other places, where she began her artistic career in the context of the Düsseldorf art scene of the early 2000s.

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The artist studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where she graduated in 2004. Since 2010 the artist K. E. lives between Düsseldorf and Brooklyn/New York.
Her best-known works include her radically socio-critical, conceptual paintings as well as her most recent works in which she combines the classic medium of oil painting with a printed pictorial world reworked in Photoshop. In these large-scale paintings, she experiments with visual idioms and the possibilities offered by the application of new technologies. With her obsessive, constantly evolving visual language, the artist turns to the dynamics of our cultural memory. She creates seemingly random, freely associated systems from codes, carriers of meaning, and energy fields.

K.E. represented Georgia at the 50th Venice Biennale and showed on the 1st Prague Biennial. She participated in shows in the U.S. and Europe and has exhibited at Haus Huth, Daimler Contemporary Berlin; Sprengel Museum, Hanover; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Central House of Artists, Moscow; CoBrA Museum, Amsterdam; Van der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal; Kunsthalle Hamburg and elsewhere. Her work group Next Comes Democracy, which she created in collaboration with Hans Mayer Gallery (Dusseldorf), is on permanent show at Daimler Contemporary Headquarters at Haus Huth, Berlin. The artist has won a number of art awards, including the Kunstpreis der Deutschen Volksbanken und Raiffeisenbanken (Germany); the UBS Art Award for Young Art (Switzerland), and The European Prize for Painting (Belgium). She was nominated for the Fountainhead Artist Residency in Miami; the residency at Etaneno Museum im Busch, Namibia; and for the International Studio & Curatorial Program, New York.

K.E.’s work can be found in number of public and private art collections including the UBS Private Bank Collection; Deutsche Bank Collection; Daimler Contemporary Art Collection; Van Der Heydt Museum Sammlung; Sammlung der Galerie der Stadt Esslingen; Museum SAFN Reykjavík; Deutsche Apotheker- und Ärztebank Sammlung; Museum für Neue Kunst Freiburg; as well in Jochen and Susi Holy Collection (Munich); Collection Susanne Porsche (Munich); Edward & Phyllis Kwalwasser Art Collection (NYC), Sammlung Philara (Dusseldorf), among others.

The artist is included in 100 Painters of Tomorrow, published by Thames & Hudson in 2014.

The first monograph on K.E.’s work “none of us and somewhere else” (Kehrer Verlag, 2007), for which Boris Groys (NYU) and Renate Wiehager (Daimler Contemporary) contributed essays, was dedicated to her critical approach.
K.E.’s second monograph “fading song in the wide open” is published by DISTANZ VERLAG in collaboration with Uta Grosenick and with the essays by Gregor Jansen (Kunsthalle Dusseldorf) and Gean Moreno (ICA Miami).