NYAB Event - Darina Karpov "Wayward"

Darina Karpov "Wayward"

Pierogi

This event has ended.

In his recent essay “Agrarian Anxieties,” historian Steven Stoll notes, “Whenever we seek control over our tiny scrap of the universe, we create hybrids—not fuel-efficient cars or cross-pollinated flora but composites of nature and culture that we stitch together, bring to life, and imagine serve us rather than stalk us.”[1] Stoll is talking here about pesticides, antibiotics and the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, but he could as easily be describing some of Darina Karpov’s major thematic concerns. Although her work is rarely if ever topical, hybridity run amok is one of its foremost subjects—its object matter is always in a state of forming, transforming or dissolving. In fact, Wayward is itself a hybrid, a transitional exhibition made up of pieces of disparate media and formats. It includes small oil paintings on canvas and panel—which represent a new direction for Karpov—as well as larger works on paper. The compositions of the large drawings have a kind of centrifugal antigravity and delicate color that are reminiscent of the high rococo; their crystalline structures spread deliberately across the surfaces of the paper, inviting slow scans from a distance while rewarding closer looks with spectacularly rich and varied details. The oil paintings tend to compress their constituent elements into much smaller formats, the primary effect of which is to allow the viewer to apprehend the details as well as the overall designs at once from an intimate distance. This intimacy, combined with the paintings’ relatively emphatic color and vigorous gestures, provides effects that are startlingly intense, almost violent. The color in most of these works trades delicacy for power, favoring a combination of acid blue-greens and reds that recall the palette of Delacroix’s late paintings. The paint application is also uncharacteristically forceful; Karpov, who typically hides her hand with a nearly superhuman fastidiousness, here leaves her brush marks unabashedly visible. They tie the designs together with remarkable speed and energy, while also providing a counterpoint to the meticulously limned forms that seem to materialize spontaneously from them.