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Untitled
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LOT 108

Karen Russo

Untitled, 2015

TechniqueWork on paper
Size78 x 105 cm
AvailabilityAvailable
Donation50%
USD 9,500
About the Artist Back to Gallery

Karen Russo's work explores the darker sides of human experience through scenes of occult happenings, uncontrollable impulses and enigmatic landscapes, revealing drawing’s capacity to summon hybrid worlds. Untitled is one such landscape from her large-scale charcoal works. In stark expressionist contrasts of shadow and light, five rhomboid monoliths - based on the standing stones built by intelligent ants in Saul Bass’s cult film Phase IV (1974) - curve across the foreground, flashing with blinding light. Behind them rises a huge winged form against tormented night skies. Borrowed from Bernhard Hoetger’s 1922 monument Niedersachsenstein in Worpswede, Germany, commemorating WWI soldiers, it resembles a high priest at a ritual, a spaceship preparing to launch, or a demon summoned from hell.

About Karen Russo

Karen Russo (b. 1974, Tel-Aviv) is an artist based in London. Russo’s work uses document and narrative in an exploration of how knowledge, perception, and culture intertwine the rational with the obscure. By tracing marginalized practices, obscure phenomena and esoteric forms of knowledge she addresses the legacy of transgressive means for understanding the unseen and the unknown.
Russo’s work has been exhibited in venues including Barbican Centre; Hayward Gallery; Tate Modern; Towner Eastbourne; Delfina; Kino Kino Centre for Contemporary Art, Sandnes; Busan Biennial; Große Kunstschau Museum, Worpswede; Haus der Kulturen Der Welt, HKW Berlin; Krefeld Museum, Krefeld; Tel-Aviv Museum, Tel-Aviv; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; CCA Tel-Aviv, Hertzliya Museum, Petach-Tikva Museum and more.
Her films have been screened in festivals such as Oberhausen, Ann Arbor, EMAF, Uppsala, Kassell to name a few.
Recent awards include: Lawrence Kasdan Award for Best Narrative Film, Ann Arbor Film Festival, 2025; Special Mention Award, Oberhausen Film Festival, 2021; Ostrovsky Family Award for Best Experimental Film, Jerusalem Film Festival, 2021, Award for an Established Video Artist, Ministry of Culture, 2018; She is a Film London Jarman Award Nominee, 2023.

View all works by Karen Russo