About Karen: American Abstract Artist

Sometimes beauty alights as gently as dewdrops on the morning grass; other times it has to climb and claw its way up a dark crevasse until against all odds it emerges into the light of day. That latter brand of tenacious, hard-won beauty is central to the origin story of Rejuvenation: My Bouquet, Karen Silve’s sumptuous and inspiring new body of work.

A half century after its heyday, we celebrate abstract expressionism for its romance and its rhetoric. It seems to us to have been the last “heroic” movement in art, formed and impelled by the need to say something at once grand and personal. But many – indeed, the majority of – artists associated with abstract expressionism were engaged less with the theater of the self than with the theater of the moment, the immediacy of sensation both as perceived in the world and as manifested in the studio. Abstract expressionism was above all an art of observation and reformulation. Whether its subjects were exterior or interior, worldly or private, sensuous or existential, its artworks were responses to sensation, optical and emotional equally. In this regard, while its era is long past, abstract expressionist practice remains viable and available. All those who inherit its language and its sense of meaning are tasked not with re-enacting its drama, but re-uncovering its delight in the world and in paint.

There are certain idioms of 20th-century art that have proved to be remarkably fertile and resilient territory for younger artists right up through the present. One is geometric abstraction, as pioneered by Constructivist and Bauhaus artists nearly 100 years and developed by Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers and later the adherents of Minimalism. Another is Abstract Expressionism, the unabashedly spontaneous and often lyrical impulse that marked a definitive American style and the first great break with European traditions in the late 1940s.