The Journal Gallery is pleased to present "Funny Farm," Kika Karadi's second solo exhibition with the gallery.
In the artist's latest body of work, analog mechanics meets primitive Neo-Symbolism.
Beginning by marking each work on glass and tracing out patterns that include fractal arches and linear diagonals, Karadi then scrapes, paints, tapes, arranges, presses, and reduces pigment into near immaterial matter, using the canvas to collect the inverse of the glass surface. The six paintings included in "Funny Farm" amplify this methodic ritual through the artist's recent inclusion of color and a newly found figurative language.
Through the ecstatic moment of creation, Karadi is determined to synthesize the scientific and the spiritual—the resulting compositional systems a precise arrangement of symbols and windows in and out of the physical plane. With this new series of various-scale paintings, the artist proposes a deeper look into the mechanics that underpin our reality, and posits that they are not entirely governed by elemental science but by the body's ability to channel and project it's own force of divine vitality.
Kika Karadi was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1975. She currently lives and works in Austin, Minnesota. Recent solo exhibitions include Jonathan Viner Gallery, London, UK (2014), The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2014), Bowery Annex Space, New York, NY (2012), Galleria Rubin, Milan, Italy (2009). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including "Abstraction: A Visual Language" at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, Illinois (2015), "I KNOW YOU GOT SOUL" at Arndt Singapore (2015), "LIFE" at Venus over Manhattan in New York, NY (2014), the 2005 Prague Biennial and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005).