Are You Reading Me | Karen Vogel

Artwork by Karen Vogel. On display July 27 to September 17, 2017.  For inquiries please contact Karen at kvstudio@mac.com or visit karenvogelstudio.com.  Instagram: karen_vogel_studio

CURATOR STATEMENT

Karen Vogel has thought a lot about social cohesion—the fabric that holds us together, different as we are, and how it unravels, comes together, is stretched in a way that challenges communication, understanding, community. In itself the idea is rich and timely, but her work drives it home powerfully through its medium as well as its method.

In this show of newly exhibited work, Vogel, a painter and printmaker (as well as landscape designer), uses typography, architecture, and organic forms almost linguistically, like visual outpourings of sound and narrative. Her influences are deep and profound: from Stuart Davis, teeming with talk and music, to the elusive gesture of Antoni Tàpies; from Richard Diebenkorn’s sublime landscapes to the bold, raw poetry of Howard Hodgkin.

There is a tendency toward reading her work, toward deciphering the forms she prints and paints, covers and removes, overlaps and deletes, builds-up and breaks down. Positive and negative spaces create a surface tension from layers of depth, connection, disorder. Vogel’s method conveys the notion of continual process; we bear witness to an ever-changing visual language whose cohesion expands and contracts over time.

Curators: Sveinn Bragason and Micaela Porta

ARTIST STATEMENT

My work utilizes a personal language of visual ciphers, such as, print, typography, architectural and organic forms to explore monumental shifts in human communication and achievement. I begin with the structure of hand-cut stencils, and evolve through layers of multiple forms, textures, patterns, and processes. How the shapes intertwine and interact embodies the essential bond between order and chaos—the bond being dissolved by the discontents of Digital Age technology.