Over the years, Darina Karpov’s process has often involved the rendering of tangled thoughts, skeins of memory, and the mapping of synaptic connections in her mind. This imagery, both abstract and figurative, is rooted in her childhood in the Soviet Union. The entanglement, confusion, anxiety of that time collides with a child’s sense of wonder, free association, and vision. Karpov meticulously builds up her paintings, drawings and sculptures with multiple layers of textures and shapes executed in precise detail but set in an amorphous, multivalent space that manages to feel perfectly natural and totally illogical at the same time. In the words of the artist: "It helps me to think of the space as a kind of positive substance, active, vibrating, and malleable." Her work is characterized by intricate technique and her treatment of subjects that seem to transform and dissolve. She takes the idea of material – its texture, decay and disintegration – as the basis of her work.
Karpov is a member of the first generation of contemporary artists to emerge from Russia after the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Born in St. Petersburg and trained at the Moscow Institute of Technology, she attended the Maryland Institute College of Art before receiving an M.F.A. from Yale University in 2001. She is represented by Pierogi Gallery in New York where she has had six solo shows. She also exhibited with Hales Gallery, London. She was included in group shows at Neuberger Museum, DeCordova Museum, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. Karpov’s work is represented in numerous public and private collections such as Princeton University Art Museum, West Collection, and Zabludowicz Trust, London. She is a recipient of 2009 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, 2011 Leon Levy Foundation Grant, and 2008 National Academy’s William Paton Prize. She was awarded fellowships at The McDowell Colony, Yaddo, two printmaking residencies at the Lower East Side Print Shop and Ucross Foundation. Her work was featured in “Frozen Dreams: Contemporary Art from Russia,” by Hossein Amirsadeghi, Thames & Hudson.
