Opening Reception
Keren Kroul | Topographies of Loss and Longing
Artist talk at 6:30PM | FREE & Open to the public
From the artist:
For the past three years I have been painting with watercolor on paper, creating dense and detailed organic formations. Vibrant and colorful, they contain clusters of meticulously drawn geometric shapes, rhythmically twisting and expanding, moving forward and away, revealing depth as they overlap.
Thematically, these structures are topographies of wonder and belonging. The imagery originates from fragmented childhood memories and present-day everyday surroundings: a web of sunlight on my grandmother’s bedroom floor, crystalline formations on frozen snow. I am searching for moments at the edges of things, imaginary, impossible, made of time and memory, landscapes of the mind.
I am drawn to the immediacy of watercolor and to the reflection of the hand in the work: irregular and flawed and of the moment. My curiosity about neural pathways and the working of memory is reflected in the construction of the imagery—repeated, layered, obliterated, resurfaced—appearing suspended over silent emptiness.
Eager to push both the form and the content of my work, I recently started cutting into the paper and experimenting with the work being away from the wall. For this exhibit at the Rochester Art Center, my goal was to create an intricate large-scale paper work to be installed hanging from the ceiling and flowing to the floor.
Continuing my interest in places of memory and landscapes of the mind, this cut and layered paper piece comes into being in the overlapping of empty space, revealing and concealing imagery. Along with the paintings on paper, it is part of an environment in which the play between micro and macro, the fragility of the line against the physicality of the whole, and the fluid interconnectedness of memory, time, and place, drives the work.
Bio
Keren Kroul was born in Haifa, Israel to an Argentinean father and Israeli mother, grew up in Mexico City, Mexico and San Jose, Costa Rica, and now lives in Minneapolis. She holds an MFA in Painting from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Fine Arts from Brandeis University.
Keren has exhibited locally and regionally, including at the Minnesota Museum of American Art, Rockford Art Museum, Duluth Art Institute, Art Museum of the University of Memphis, Soo Visual Arts Center, and Rosalux, among others. She was an ArtPrize Finalist in 2016 (2D category), and was featured in the 2016 season of MN Original (TPT – Twin Cities PBS). Keren is a 2015 and 2017 recipient of the Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant. She is an adjunct painting instructor at Augsburg College in Minneapolis.
Keren’s work can be viewed at www.kerenkroul.com.
