LOS ANGELES, CA.- Garis & Hahn announces Garden of Mutei, an exhibition of new compositions by Karen Margolis, on view March 24 through April 28, 2018. The exhibition marks Margolis's solo debut with the gallery featuring new works from the artist’s “Integration” series, her largest compositions to date, and a new installation made from unraveled woven sculptures.
The exhibition title, Garden of Mutei, refers to a starting point of emptiness from which form can emerge. Margolis cultivates her compositions from this undefined space, weaving ephemeral thoughts and ideas into tapestries of brilliant colors. The circle recurs throughout her works as the artist’s primary means of communication, the embodiment of infinity and perfection and in her reinterpretating of positive and negative space.
In the “Integration” series, Margolis burns holes into Abaca paper in an act of elimination that she balances by painting as well as sewing map fragments into the paper. The artist’s latest works are scaled to over double the size of her first “Integration” compositions, incorporating a wider set of colors and dense concentrations of thread. The threadwork gives the appearance of coming together while also seemingly falling apart, two directly opposed notions which reference destruction and creation, an intrinsic characteristic of her work.
Simultaneously, the works can be read as intense psychological portraits: a translation of meaning into visual patterns. In each of the works, Margolis references a color chart that she created, in which each color variation is representative of a designated emotion. Utilizing this code, Margolis records personal feelings and interior monologues into her artistic compositions as a chronicle of the organized chaos of operations inside the mind. In this way, Margolis imbues the composition with meaning, as well as encrypting it to obfuscate comprehension.
Karen Margolis graduated with a BS in Psychology from Colorado State University and studied at the School of Visual Arts, New York. She is a recipient of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant (1999) and a recent commission by the Metropolitan Transit Authority to create a site-specific mosaic for a New York City subway station. Margolis participated in the 2016 Paper Biennial at the Rijswijk Museum, The Hague, Netherlands, and has exhibited at galleries and institutions including Garis & Hahn, New York; Muriel Guepin, New York; and Bridgewater University, Bridgewater, MA. Her work is included in public and private collections in the US and abroad.
