Quotes

"The Advocate and Greenwich Time, September 12, 2004 "The Diet Show" marries a unique modernist language to conceptualism by way of a contemporary theme. Here Karpinskaia enters the largely unexplored territory claimed by an iconic post-feminist conceptual work of the last decade... Here, at last, we find a new form derived from the interplay between such opposites as personal/universal, private/public and fashion/art. the result is an authentic feminine response to both modernism and conceptualism that delivers new social relevance into the contemporary art scene... the bold visual language she has relentlessly developed ... arrived at a powerful insight. Karpinskaia, a native Russian with a string of advanced degrees, moves the tired masculine rites of conceptualism into a refreshing and bold feminine realism redefining the body as a source of inspiration." by L.P. Streitfeld, "Silvermine pushes into New Directions". 

The Advocate, May 15, 2005 "Natasha Karpinskaia, a virtual fount of creativity and talent, just can't seem to stop making pictures.For years she courageously placed her development from art scholar to practicing artist in full view of the public. Karpinskaia has you wondering if her meteoric rise as a self-determined artist can be genetic - something evolving out of the Russian soul, long repressed by totalitarianism yet refusing to swing to its opposite - American materialism. The result happens to be chairs that are so alluring in their charm that they insist on being more than an object, more than a symbol, but comand an astonishing presence all their own. by L.P. Streitfeld, "Pull Up a Seat: Haviland Street Gallery has a Winner". 

The Advocate, June 20, 2004 "This stunning exhibition bursts with vitality and color, a rewarding creative adventure for artist and viewer alike.... This lush series of animated pictures was produced over a short period of time. Surfaces throb with the vitality of a deeply embedded longing - depths of soul seeking communion with spirit. Working rapidly from the unconscious, Karpinskaia achieves multilayered narratives through multiple print runs. by L.P. Streitfeld, "Chaos Meets Order in Karpinskaia's "Mini Pix". 

Wilton Bulletin, November 2004 "Brilliant colors, lush surfaces and a sense of humor"have been the words to describe Natasha Karpinskaia's work... Ms. Karpinskaia starts with an idea and lets her imagination take over. It is an imagination nourished by years as an art historian in russia. She was a curator in Moscow's largest museum of Russian art, has a master's degree in art history from the Academy of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, and another in English and French linguistics from Moscow University. She is completing her dissertation on American and Russian landscape painting for her Ph.D. at Columbia. by Lois H. Alcosser, "Russian art historian, painter showcases 'wonderful side of life'. 

Wilton Villager, February 3, 2006 "Her visual vocabulary draws on her academic knowledge of symbolism and its power to convey information emotionally as well as intellectually. Karpinskaia's most recent works are complex abstract monoprints: rich with layers of color and texture, the pieces invite extensive viewing and interpretation".

Selected Publications and Reviews

Pictures at an Exhibition 2017, Norwalk Hour, October 2017
Academy 2011, Washington Post, July 22, 2011
Steppin’ Out, by Harriet Hiller, The Hour, February 2008
Russian Curator Focuses on Painting, by Fran Sikorski, CT Acorn Papers
From Russia with Love, Wilton Villager, April 2006
Karpinskaia to Be “Layered and Stacked” at Ridgefield Guild Show, The Wilton Villager, February 2006
Artists’ Different Styles Come Together for Show, The News-Times, Ridgefield, CT, February 13, 2006
Pull Up a Seat: Haviland Street Gallery Has a Winner by L. P. Streitfeld, The Advocate and Greenwich Time, May 2005
Russian Art Historian, Painter Showcases Wonderful Side of Life, by Lois H. Alcosser, The Wilton Bulletin, November 2004
Silvermine Pushes into New Directions by L. P. Streitfeld, The Advocate and Greenwich Time, September 2004
Chaos Meets Order in Karpinskaia’s Mini Pix’ by L. P. Streitfeld, The Advocate and Greenwich Time, June 20, 2004
“States of Mind” at Norwalk Art Gallery, Norwalk Hour, April 2004
Building Bridges, Maya Taal, Stamford Times, September 2003
At Wilton Art Gallery: Natasha Karpinskaia Will Exhibit Jan. 28- Feb. 21,2003 Wilton Bulletin, Jan. 23
Life Inside the Lofts: LAA’s Open Studios Brings the Public Face- to Face with Serious Art, by Brita Brundage, Fairfield County Weekly, November 7, 2002
Who's Who in the Arts, Fairfield County Weekly, September 26, 2002
Unusual Beginnings, Thomas Melana, Advocate and Greenwich Time May 12, 2002
Invigorating New Blood at Silvermine,by L. P. Streitfeld , The Stamford Advocate and
Greenwich Time January 20, 2002

Natasha Karpinskaia: Looking, Like Listening

Consider, if you will, music.

Consider it because Natasha Karpinskaia makes abstract art that is like music: works that are avowedly visceral, overtly sensual, seductively lyrical. Look at one of the seminal works in her oeuvre — say, 2015’s Pencil Drawing 2 — and your mood will be affected, just as surely as your intellect is engaged. As so often happens with music, the two faculties — emotions and intellect — will be so thoroughly intertwined that you’ll be hard pressed to analyze where one leaves off and the other begins.

Look at a good Karpinskaia, and you will likely feel no more inclined to ponder art world shibboleths (Is painting dead?…Are you sufficiently outside your comfort zone?) than you would the relative merits of melody versus atonalism while listening to Bizet’s Carmen. In some ineffable yet undeniable way, your brain chemistry will be altered, inducing pleasure and keen intuition. You will probably not, in the moment of looking, feel any overwhelming compulsion to know where or how the artist lives, how she expresses her artistic philosophy, or what the critics, curators, and public think (though these facts might well interest you later). Nor might you care to hear about any defining theoretical rationale undergirding the work — is it Minimalist? Conceptualist? Post-Modern? — because while Karpinskaia’s art may provoke intellectual discourse, her best images derive their power from acts of play and discovery, transcending their ideological framework.

But I digress. Let’s get back to music.

Mozart, more than one musicologist has observed, was a subversive, because his works needed no theoretical rationale to prop them up. The music itself is its own best explanation; its beauty is self-contained and self-evident. The same might be said of Matisse’s paper cutouts, David Hockney’s shimmering swimming pools, Francis Bacon’s discomfiting visual ruminations on the human condition, and Karpinskaia’s best work.

Karpinskaia, who would not dream of comparing her art to Mozart’s, is nonetheless inspired by his music, and by other classical music. She embraces the axiom that form is to art what time is to music: a medium so malleable and fungible as to offer limitless possibilities. Likewise, in her work, color is like musical tone: an exquisitely nuanced and fluid element, alternately lush, muted, dense, delicately transparent, bold, or blazing. (It is not a coincidence that in musical terminology, the creative use of tonal variation is called “coloration.”) Karpinskaia gives equally rich consideration to matters of design and spatial activation, which are to her pictures what phrasing is to music: an element that, arranged with a certain deadly effectiveness, yields lyricism. If the composer (read: “artist”) does this trick just right, she can provoke deep thoughts and engender powerful emotions in a listener (read: “viewer”). The point of the exercise is not merely to create something new; it is to create something new, emotionally moving, and passionately reasoned.

At her best, Karpinskaia hits all three touchstones. She does break new ground, but in the realm of intimately savored experiences; she is not interested in delivering ideologically driven spectacles. Like all master printmakers who make monotypes, she perspicaciously exploits the element of chance. She herself never knows exactly what the press will yield; she has simply created the conditions under which interesting things can happen, and when they do, she shares them with us. We see this dynamic at work throughout much of her printmaking output, in works like Double Vision, a 2014 monotype on paper that resoundingly echoes the natural world in all its multifarious splendor, at both macro and micro levels of perception.

Which brings to mind another relevant analogy, this one best broached as a question:

Visually speaking, By what process does nature itself design?

The question sounds grandiose; it flirts with profound, cosmic realms of scientific, religious, and philosophical inquiry. Yet, artistic imagination renders it a commonplace, practical matter. It is indeed a root of so much great art that it would take an immense, monumental treatise to unspool the protean figures and fruits of genius it has inspired over the centuries. More to the point, Karpinskaia, like many artists in the modern era, is enthralled by a corollary question: To what extent can the making of abstract art emulate the process by which nature designs, as opposed to merely representing the results, as Realism does? Many of Karpinskaia’s influential forbears — Malevich, Matisse, Diebenkorn, Calder, and Klee among them — went down this path. Among her contemporaries, Elizabeth Murray explored it, albeit more obliquely. (Murray’s master stroke was to reinvigorate the process by supplanting naturalistic imagery with her own cartoonish iconography, in effect exploring the question, Can the artist emulate the process by which human nature designs?)

Karpinskaia lets these questions drive her inventive and prolific explorations. A painter and printmaker, she has worked both non-objectively and representation-ally (she currently favors abstraction), and in some modes that, like Matisse’s sublime musings, inhabit the fertile shadowland between Abstraction and Realism. Her work embodies a joyful irony: she holds a doctorate in art history from Columbia University, but eschews theoretical dogma. She realized, she has said, that when it came to making art, she wanted to do it rather than talk about it.

She has now been doing it for more than two decades, with formidable skill and inspired abandon. Her images are like conversations blooming into stories; they grab you and draw you in. They reflect both modernity and something primal. In appreciating them, you might even wonder whether such works can be fully comprehended in the sterile precincts of a museum. They seem intended for a more personal setting, like someone’s home or workspace, where the art becomes an emotively charged extension of the surrounding architecture and design, telegraphing its role in people’s everyday lives.

None of this is to say that Karpinskaia ignores theoretical underpinnings. It’s just that the theory she applies has little to do with the hidebound orthodoxies of movements; she is more interested in mining fertile principles of color and design theory for her own universalist ends, reconstituting them in ways that evoke delight and wonder. The results feel anything but academic. Consider, for example, her use of opposing warm and cool colors. It is a rudiment: early in their training, art students are taught that the sympathetic vibration of juxtaposed warm and cool colors creates the illusion of light and space. In mature hands, this effect can be put to spectacular use. Stand before J.M.W. Turner’s The Harbor at Dieppe, in the Frick Collection, for instance, and you will palpably feel as if you can reach inside the picture and sweep your arm around in the open air. Karpinskaia understands this device and employs it powerfully, in fresh and surprising ways. In works like 2011’s Eclipse and 2014’s Moonstruck (both monotypes on paper), she merges these warm/cool oppositions with textural surface manipulations and gestural marks to create startling, otherworldly landscapes. These are purely abstract pictures, yet to look at them is to feel as if you are inhabiting a place.

Always, she draws on her seemingly endless vocabulary of forms — a visual language that she playfully parlays to achieve poetic or narrative ends — arranging them in luminous counterpoint: round, rectangular, singular, plural, big, small, linear, expansive. Many of her images look like mysteriously compelling icons, as in Those Who Stay and Those Who Go, from her Monophon 2014 series, or Enclosed Space 1, a 2012 work (both are monotypes). In other works, she marries visual poetry to pure sensation, as she does with the dancing forms and sublimely muted colors of her 2003 work Facial Expressions.

In some of her paintings and prints, Karpinskaia’s influences show clearly, yet the works are far from derivative. You can see Klee’s influence in her 2009 monotype Familiar Strangers, for example, but the statement, with its gloriously electric color palette, elegant geometry, and raw, spontaneous drawing, is uniquely Karpinskaia’s. That same year, she produced the evocative, lushly colorful Monument Series, V, a work that seems to pick up where Josef Albers left off. In Monument Series, V, Albers’ expanses of pure color and reductive, hard-edged geometry give way to Karpinskaia’s updated take on the theme: variegated surface textures and a subtle plurality of diffusely colored forms, drawn directly into the pigment. He gave us wondrously pure color, in quiet compositions that look man-made; she gives us a perceptive visual meditation on the sometimes-blurry boundaries between what is man-made and what comes from nature.

Karpinskaia is hardly alone in her quest to stimulate thoughtful pleasure in viewers, but the Mozartian purity of her aesthetic is impressive — especially right now, with the art world veering toward an obsession with political correctness. Never mind all that, she seems to be saying. Go ahead: be like the capacious adolescent who, upon encountering Gauguin’s Two Tahitian Women for the first time in a museum, falls in love, wishing he could take the painting home with him and live with it. You’ll feel good, and for good reason: you have been overtaken. The artist has more than mastered theory and technique, transcending them both to deliver passionate expression, and you were moved. A single word describes that level of artistry, and it is the same in both music and art: it is virtuosity.

                                                                                       — Mark Schnapper