Paul Thiebaud Gallery is presenting Karla Wozniak’s debut exhibition with the gallery. The nine brightly colored, recent paintings in the exhibition embody a shift in Wozniak’s work towards abstraction, while incorporating the themes of landscape and childhood play that have informed her previous works. The exhibition is on view through November 2, 2024.
Karla Wozniak’s current paintings are a synthesis of thoughts and ideas originating from her everyday life, including reflections on the childhood games and activities her daughter enjoys and the dramatic weather events – wind, rain, fire, smoke, flooding – she has experienced living in the San Francisco Bay Area in recent years, and the climate anxieties they evoke. To convey this in paint, Wozniak employs vivid colors and heavily textured impasto on her canvases. The dominant feature in each of the compositions is the use of looping lines to break up pictorial space, which also serve to create smaller pockets of experience. In some works, the line can evoke recognizable imagery, such as smoke, water, balls, or a jump rope. In others it behaves more abstractly, forming interlocking and overlapping shapes that recall the early modernist forms used by painters such as Charles Burchfield, Henri Matisse, and Hilma af Klint. This dance between representation and abstraction is important to Wozniak, allowing elements in her paintings to have multiple identities, as can be seen in Underwater Jump Rope (2023), Fall Sunrise (2023), and Lemon Lime (2024).
Each of the paintings in the exhibition originates from an initial graphite drawing. Wozniak began making these drawings as a nightly exercise during the pandemic, which has resulted in her having hundreds to choose from. Those she selects act as entry points for the eventual finished paintings. Wozniak then begins by using acrylics to lay down the initial ground layers on the canvas. She then shifts to using oils for the upper layers and to create her richly textured surfaces. As she does so, Wozniak intentionally leaves areas open for the underlayers, and sometimes the gesso itself, to be visible. By doing so, Wozniak conveys both her interest in the process of how a painting is made and how a painting can act as a record of the time it took to create it.
Karla Wozniak received her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. She has been the recipient of an Alice Kimbell English travelling Fellowship (2005), a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (2011), and was a finalist for SFMOMA’s SECA Award in 2019. She has received numerous residencies, including those at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the MacDowell Colony, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Millay Colony Residency. Her works have been exhibited across the United States, as well as in Europe and Canada, and can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston and the Knoxville Museum of Art. Her work has been featured in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Village Voice, and The Huffington Post, among others. Wozniak is currently an Associate Professor at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA.
