about Karen (Fr)
Karen Silve’s paintings are distillations of her emotions, impressions, and experiences in the realms of nature and culture. Surrounded by the scenic beauty of the Pacific Northwest and the countryside around her family home in Provence, France, she layers color and gesture into abstracted narratives—composites of visuals, sensations, and memories, which coalesce in a non-literal pictorial space. Often, the paintings create a bridge between counterpoints, such as ambiguity/clarity, calmness/tension, and exterior/interior—resulting in a deep sense of harmony and resolution.
Placing the artist in the lineages of Cézanne, Monet, de Kooning, and Mitchell, renowned critic Peter Frank adds: “For all their brushy, dripping exuberance, Silve’s paintings are composed with an almost architectural rigor that emulates nature’s own glorious rhythms.”
This heightened sensitivity to the natural world may stem from her early work in figuration and landscape. It was as an emerging artist, studying in Aix-en-Provence France at the Leo Marchutz School, that she found her true passion for painting, color, and nature, as well as the work ethic that would power her through the years to come. Since those formative years, she has exhibited in museums, art centers, and galleries in New York City, Washington, D.C., Chicago, Miami, Santa Fe, and Sun Valley, as well as the United Kingdom, Venice, Qatar, Brunei, and Mexico, where her work is included in the permanent collection of the U.S. Consulate in Monterrey. The recipient of prestigious grants and residencies, she has won critical praise in publications such as The Washington Post (“Her free hand and lively spattering recall Jackson Pollock... and parallel the technique of Gerhard Richter”) and from ARTnews and New York Times contributor Ann Landi (“Because many of her works are human-scaled, we relate to them with our own bodies and enter into her dialogue with materials”).