Two Painters Offer Approaches to Organic Abstraction
Lisa Harris Gallery is pleased to announce two solo exhibitions by Pacific Northwest painters, Karen Kosoglad and Victoria Johnson.
Kosoglad’s recent mixed-media paintings bridge figuration and abstraction. Intensified line and gestural elements bring freshness and balance to her figurative subject matter. A process-oriented artist, Kosoglad works entirely from live models, exploring rhythm and shape with her organic approach to the female figure. She acknowledges, "there is an illusive truth that I'm trying to capture in relation to the actual form and the balance of the abstract form." Her figures, through being abstracted, become part of the space they exist in, creating a kind of organic geometry. "Karen Kosoglad: Contour, Gesture, and Figure" will be on view at Lisa Harris Gallery Mar. 5th - Mar. 29th.
Victoria Johnson’s non-objective works materialize refined, dynamic forms that embrace energy, motion, and the slipperiness of perception. Her painted forms appear to float in and out of the picture plane, rotating, jostling, caressing, and intersecting one another. Johnson’s sophisticated use of color exudes a high emotional temperature and enhances the kinetic quality of her paintings. Her newest body of work incorporates hints of landscape. The artist states that she has "come to see the nature of my paintings as driven by the spirit of a figure-ground relationship. Of growing interest to me is a sense of the primal manner in which we relate to the earth’s horizon and how we exist in the context of landscape." Visit "Victoria Johnson: Color Narratives" Mar. 5th - Mar. 29th at Lisa Harris Gallery.
A native of Portland with a B.S. in Fine Art from the University of Oregon, Victoria Johnson also attended Santa Fe Institute of the Arts, and now makes her home in Tacoma, Washington. Her works may be found in regional, national and international collections in New York, New Orleans, Vancouver, Macao, and Yerevan, as well as Seattle.
Kosoglad received her Bachelors Degree from the University of California at Santa Cruz where she came under the influence of Donald Weygandt, a colleague of Richard Diebenkorn. She holds a Masters in Education and has taught in the Seattle public schools since 1993.Her work has been privately collected in Boston, Chicago and New York as well as on the West Coast and in Italy.
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