COLOGNE.- Galerie Karsten Greve is presenting a solo exhibition featuring works by American artist Carole Seborovski in Cologne. The exhibition is open by appointment only. Karsten Greve, the gallery owner, discovered the artist in the United States, and exhibited her work for the first time in his Paris gallery in 1991. In 1992 and in 2004, Seborovski had solo exhibitions in Cologne. This is Seborovski’s tenth solo exhibition with Karsten Greve. On display are more than thirty object-paintings and works on paper, executed between 1994 and 2004.

Carole Seborovski was born 1960 in San Diego, California. She received her Bachelor of Arts from the California College of the Arts, in 1982. She continued her studies at the New York Studio School, and received her Master of Arts in painting from the Hunter College, New York, in 1987. She received a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 1986, and in 1991 the Agnes Bourne Fellowship in Visual Arts in 1990. In the same year she was Artist in Residence of the Djerassi Foundation, San Francisco. A grant from the National Endowment for the Arts followed in 1991. Carole Seborovski’s work has been widely exhibited in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally since 1984. Her work is represented in numerous important public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., and the Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano. The artist lives and works in New York.

Carole Seborovski conjoins two different worlds in her art. One is the material world comprised of tangible surfaces, the world that is perceived through sensations of touching and seeing. The other world is one beyond that of sensation, a spiritual world, immaterial, and transcendental. The artist has stated that her work “reflects personal experiences, and it also touches upon my interests in art, nature, myths, and religions from different cultures. In a Jungian way, I am drawn to archetypal interconnectedness. I lean towards abstraction because I find it to be poetic, and more open to multiple interpretations. For me, art is something that is spiritual in nature. It is something that connects us to the unknown, to our culture, and to each other as human beings.”

Some objects are highly charged with sexual connotations, like in Girl’s Dream (2000) and in her painting Sex Icon (2001). The object-paintings may have radiantly warm natural colors, or they may be high-keyed in hue, and incorporate shiny metal domes, and painted yarn, as in the diptych Pink Expanse / Silver Spheres (2004). Seborovski often creates mandala-like forms by combining square and circular motifs. These ancient symbols of unity, can be a means of integrating fragmentation and the balancing of opposites, like in Stream / Silver Tears (1995 – 1996). Another symbolic structure that has preoccupied Carole Seborovski is the oval; suggestive of the egg, fertility, and pregnancy, it may be read as a symbol of the procreative feminine. Some examples are Baby Squares (2001), Pods (2002), Reflections (2002) and Ryoanji (2002). Plaster, silicone, vinyl, rope, glass, beads, fabric, and enamel are combined creating modernist fetishes. Biomorphic forms, Surrealism, and a breath of archaic African sculpture, combined with some influence of artists like Lucio Fontana, and Louise Bourgeois, have produced an art of unforced liveliness and creativity by American artist Carole Seborovski.

The exhibition also features works on paper. The subtle textures and topography bring the observer nearer to the work. “My drawings”, as Seborovski explains, “are interactive, and their reading is altered depending on how the light plays against the surface, and ones viewpoint in relationship to it. Like a Zen garden all of the elements cannot be grasped at once”. She develops the metallic sheen in her drawings by burnishing the paper with graphite, as in Cut and Turned Reflections (1999 – 2001), and creates shifting spatial relationships by incorporating paper collage, as in Fairy Tale Snake-like Cloud (2001), and a soft atmospheric space emerges by veils of ink wash, as in Curious Garden (2001).

Carole Seborovski produces richly sensual, exactingly crafted objects using a wide range of materials; the work cross- references multiple-cultures, manifests the physical and points towards the spiritual.