Krista Reuter

Krista Reuter received her BFA from Iowa State University and continued her education at the Royal College of Art in London — one of the world’s most selective postgraduate art institutions. She is based in Spring Lake, Michigan, and for six years served as program director for the Saugatuck Center for the Arts before turning fully to her studio practice. She has worked with fine art and fine craft galleries across the country and is represented internationally.

Her medium is paper, but the description requires precision. She does not paint on paper or draw on it in the conventional sense — she builds with it. Layers of hand-cut and hand-torn paper are stacked and separated by air, so that the gaps between sheets cast actual shadows onto the surfaces below.

Those shadows become secondary marks — lines and gradients that the artist did not draw, generated by the angle of light in the room. The result is a work that changes as the viewer moves, as the light shifts, as the time of day changes. In Harlequin Repositioned, The work consists of nested white paper forms—each edge irregularly torn, each layer offset to create shallow air gaps—stacked against a teal ground patterned with a subtle diamond grid.

Those gaps generate actual shadows that register as thin dark lines on the cream-colored papers beneath, producing a secondary linear map that complicates the swelling, organic contours of the cutout itself. The spatial reading moves inward through concentric rings toward a small dark aperture at the center, yet the shadow-marks pull the eye outward across the surface, creating a perceptual conflict between the form's volumetric depth and the flatness the shadows insist upon. In Power In The Pause, The work comprises dozens of hand-cut and hand-torn strips of paper—predominantly deep blues, teals, and grays—stacked with deliberate spacing that allows shadows cast by each layer to register as actual marks on the white ground below, creating a secondary image of wavering lines that runs parallel to the physical forms.