KAREN MARGOLIS
"from the department of the interior"
Industry Preview
April 30th, 2025 11am-1pm
Opening Reception
May 1st, 2025 6pm-8pm
About the Artist
Karen Margolis is a conceptually based, process driven artist using discarded and damaged materials to examine relationships between human nature and environment. Works contemplate turbulence within repetitive cycles of life that allude to states of transformation. “I explore the dynamics between psychological and physical experience using alchemical processes to collapse boundaries between solid form and the evanescence of our emotions.”
Margolis’ work will be featured in BravinLee programs,“The Golden Thread 2”. Her work was recently included in the Brooklyn Museum’s Artists Exhibition and The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, New York City 2024. She participated in the “Cut up/Cut out” exhibition that traveled to regional museums throughout the United States from 2016 through 2021. Previous exhibitions include the Paper Biennial at the Rijswijk Museum, Netherlands; The Hunterdon Art Museum, New Jersey; Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina; The Fine Arts Center of the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Connecticut; and the Parrish Art Museum, New York.
Margolis will be the subject of a solo exhibition at RAM Gallery, Summit NJ in May 2025. Previous solo exhibitions include 490 Atlantic Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Foley Gallery, New York City; K. Imperial Fine Arts, San Francisco; Garis and Hahn in Los Angeles; Bridgewater University, MA; Salon Zurcher, Paris, France; M Missoni, New York City through Garis & Hahn and The Delaware Center for Contemporary Art.
In 2024 the artist completed a large-scale public commission for Amtrak’s Metropolitan Lounge in Union Station Washington, DC. She created an installation for Amtrak’s Metropolitan Lounge in Moynihan Train Hall, New York City in 2023, as well as a series of sculptural paintings for a Science/Life complex in Boston and large scale works on paper for a Science Building in New York City. Margolis constructed a public art installation for the 2020 Art on Paper Fair. In 2018 she designed a series of mosaic panels for the 86 Street subway station, N Line in Brooklyn, NY through MTA Arts in Transit.
Margolis received a Trellis Art Fund Founders Grant in 2024. She was awarded a workspace residency at Dieu Donne Papermill and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. Residing in New York City, she received a BS in Psychology and certificate in Microscopy. Her work is represented internationally in private and public collections.
Artist Statement
My artmaking is an expedition into nature, the cosmos and consciousness, probing the depths of the universe and at the same time looking inward. Paper is a primary material. It is a medium for storytelling – a container for thoughts and feelings, serving as a bridge between perception and the external world. I’m drawn to the imprint as a physical memory embedded within paper and its capacity to evoke psychological and emotional experiences.
Compositions explore materiality through interstitial space. Imagery is reduced to particles of repetitive and random form. I use a fundamental language of symbols based on the circle – a molecule, a neurotransmitter, an Ensō – the sacred Zen Buddhist symbol embodying perfection and infinity. I’m attracted to the mystical implications as well as paradox of imperfection and reinterpret the circle in both positive and negative space. I expand the circle’s vocabulary through architecture and color. Burning holes into paper releases form into sculptural space. Map fragments, wires and threads deconstruct personal histories into universal themes of transformation that reflect the ambiguity with which we navigate our surroundings.
In addition, I assemble sculptural installations from the dismembered remains of older artworks. The turbulence of creation is implicit in the materials, which are subjected to labor intensive processes of eradication. My process is both destructive and rehabilitative, involving deforming, unraveling and burning maps, paper and wires that I repair with thread and regenerate with vibrant colors. Retaining residual marks, rips and holes from their preceding incarnations, the fragments are woven into forms that dissolve into nebulous clouds of color and texture. Works remain fixed in a continual state of transition between growth and disintegration.
There is a richly embroidered understory in the act of making and unmaking. Destruction as a means of creation is fully embedded in my process as a way to burrow into the interior of broken form. Each fragment is part of an interrupted story yearning to be interconnected.