Artist: Exene Karros
Exhibition title: God strike me down or at least pay attention
Venue: Harkawik, New York, US
Date: September 10 – October 12, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Harkawik, New York
The ubiquity and ambivalence of corporate iconography, the banality of violence and pleasure, the vacancy of identity articulated through narrow registers, and the thrill of transgressive appropriation linger in the compact, demonstrative, and unexpectedly lovely paintings of Exene Karros. Chief among her fixations is a quintessentially American urban experience, one suffused with late capitalist malaise, and remarkably circumspect in the cultivation of a semiotic toolkit.
Like a Virgin Mary winking from a piece of moldy Wonder Bread, the pictures in God strike me down or at least pay attention chart a strained but rigorous attempt to make meaning from the most vacant forms, identifying joy and pleasure in debasement. Karros’ work confounds the current apparatus of representational painting by foregrounding its demonstrative form, and in this way, she channels the aims of the Pictures artists-chiefly, Salle and Rosenquist. Her paintings are tools.
Karros’ primary compositional method is tied to a dated software program she runs on a beater iMac in the corner of her sparse Philadelphia studio. She’s as unsentimental about this as she is about her process, her fixations, or the personal symbology that forms the basis for a series of cryptic flow charts on flat gray grounds of gunmetal, cement, putty, Coffee Mate-taupe. Her imagery is immediately iconic and mundane: Abraham Lincoln, Statue of Liberty, The Cross, Dove, Toy Soldiers, Livery Vehicles, Mr. Peanut. They resemble hieroglyphics, and it is tempting to read into their artifactual, sociological qualities. Yet the overarching effect is one of broad revelation rather than hermetic specificity, borne of a logic indifferent to painting’s aesthetic properties or traditions.
Levity is crucial for Karros, both in terms of its spiritual implications and compositional avenues. Recalling the photographs of Sara Charlesworth, her people are suspended in something stuck uncomfortably between diagrammatic stasis and fluid motion aimed at eventual peril. The paintings ask for decoding, like writing on the wall of an old parking garage left by a kind malingerer to map the way out, one that instead leads to oblivion via maddening loops. They might be hobo signs, scatological ramblings or divine speech. Her symbols are rendered with a labored precision that is both humorous, melancholy, and inflected with a desire for a kind of divine encounter, looking to these things as idols, as tokens of some sign of a future. The biggest lurking in Karros’ blunt and punchy paintings is ultimately, surprisingly, hope.
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, God strike me down or at least pay attention, 2022, exhibition view, Harkawik, New York
Exene Karros, Bad Knowledge, 2021, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 14” H x 11” W
Exene Karros, Receiving Bad News (Chart 11A), 2022, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 20” H x 20” W
Exene Karros, Knowing 2, 2021, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, When You Die I Think You Keep Living, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 20” H x 16” W
Exene Karros, Martyrdom of a Saint, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, Martyrdom of a Saint, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, Wondering If Soldiers Go to Heaven 2, 2022, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, Urgent Situation (Chart 4), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 20” H x 24” W
Exene Karros, Loss (Chart 11B), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 28” H x 22” W
Exene Karros, Unfortunate Drivers Ed Lesson (A Metaphor), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, Before The Storm (Chart 1), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 32” H x 18” W
Exene Karros, Robots These Days, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 14” H x 11” W
Exene Karros, Hand of God, 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, Wondering if Soldiers Go to Heaven 1, 2022, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, January (Chart 5F), 2022, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 21” H x 16” W
Exene Karros, Countdown (Chart 1A), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 22” H x 28” W
Exene Karros, He Didn’t Have to Die, 2021, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, A Tale As Old As Time (Chart 11A), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 22” H x 28” W
Exene Karros, Bad Situation (Chart 10F), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 29” H x 24” W
Exene Karros, God Has Very Weird Motives (Chart 11C), 2022, Acrylic on canvas, 22” H x 24” W
Exene Karros, Just Wondering About God, 2022, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 16” H x 12” W
Exene Karros, The End, 2021, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 16” H x 20” W
Exene Karros, Dedicated to Father Time (Chart 10B), 2022, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 24” H x 18” W
Exene Karros, It Is Getting so Crowded in Heaven, 2021, Acrylic and latex on canvas, 11” H x 14” W
