NEW YORK, NY.- Gladstone Gallery announced the representation of American artist Karen Kilimnik, in collaboration with Galerie Eva Presenhuber and Sprüth Magers. Recognized for her enchanting figurative paintings, Kilimnik and her practice align with Gladstone’s history of working with artists who have made pivotal contributions to the trajectory of contemporary art. Gladstone mounts its first exhibition with Kilimnik in January 2025.
Explore this publication gathers a selection of around 130 never-before-published early works on paper from the Philadelphia-based artist Karen Kilimnik (born 1955), whose oeuvre encompasses paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures and films, and explores themes of mythology and femininity, history and fiction.
Influenced by Romantic painting traditions in portraiture and landscape, Kilimnik explores a diverse range of subjects in her work—from contemporary culture to Old Master paintings, as well as television shows, movies, books, magazines, music, ballet, theatre, animal portraits, and fairytales—rooted in her childhood and studies in art and architecture in Philadelphia. In the mid-1980s and early 1990s, beginning with a group show at Colin de Land’s American Fine Arts Co, and followed by many exhibitions at 303 Gallery, she presented a series of shows featuring paintings, photographs, drawings, sculptures, and films, arranged throughout the gallery spaces. Kilimnik’s paintings of portraits, landscapes, houses, interiors, animals, and scenes from ballet reflect mythology, femininity, historical and fictional themes, rendered through confident, loose brushwork.
“I have had the pleasure of knowing Karen Kilimnik for nearly 35 years, back in the days when artists submitted 35 mm slides to galleries. She is part of my own origin story in the art world of New York City. She helped me and many others understand what contemporary art could be at the dawn of a new century. Her work is complex and defies easy categorization—intimately personal and wonderfully opaque. It is thoroughly American yet saturated in the borderless, mediated world we now inhabit. I have always been a superfan, and I’m thrilled to welcome Karen to Gladstone Gallery,” said Gavin Brown.
Gladstone presents its first exhibition with Kilimnik, opening January 16, 2025, in New York, featuring her beach paintings series, which served for the artist as “an escape from the Orwellian insanity of the past four and a half years.” Kilimnik, born and raised in Philadelphia, studied at Temple University. Her work has been included in major exhibitions at Kunsthaus Glarus (2023), Le Consortium, Dijon (2013, 2007), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver (2013), The Brant Foundation, Greenwich (2012), the Belvedere Museum, Vienna (2010), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (2008), the Serpentine Gallery, London (2007), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Miami (2007), the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2006), the Fondazione Bevilacqua La Masa, Venice (2005), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2002) and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (1992). Major group exhibitions include the Fondation Vincent van Gogh Arles, Arles (2024), Fondazione Prada, Milano (2021), Haus Mödrath, Kerpen (2020), the Carnegie International, 57th Edition in Pittsburgh (2018), the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2016, 2008, 1993), the Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2015, 2010), Le Grand Palais, Paris (2013), the Tate Modern, London (2012), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2012), the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and the MOMA PS1, New York (both 2006), the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005, 2001, 1999), the Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1997), and the Secession, Vienna (1994). In 2011, Kilimnik created a stage scenery for Alexei Ratmansky’s ballet “Psyché” at the Opéra National de Paris.
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