the semi-finalist is: karen schifano

A Bit Frantic
2024, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

I walked into Karen Schifano’s studio in the Brooklyn Navy Yard last November not knowing what I would find, and 2 ½ hours later I found myself more than a little reluctant to leave as the sky darkened outside an industrial wall of windows. What hit me right away during that visit is that drama is a key ingredient in Schifano’s abstract canvases. At times it reveals itself as something approaching a theater itself - a curtain gently pulled back or stretched taut to reveal a stage of shapes, colors, and lines. The rhythm in a work like “A Bit Frantic” (2023) is part tangled baroque scrum and part classical grace, the latter reminiscent of the deliberate moves in an understated Nicolas Poussin painting (see The Companions of Rinaldo from 1633 or Midas Washing at the Source of Pactolus 1627). Looking even further back for the roots of her DNA, Schifano’s compositions pulse with the abstract cadence of ancient Greek painted pottery while reflecting our own era’s emotional intensity. She largely avoids specifics that could too easily be tied to myth or the nightly news, yet somehow produces image after image that registers as both ancient and contemporary.

In a recent series of small works, Schifano playfully drops over-sized black dots into her compositions. Her confident and casual approach gives them dual lives as flat shapes and endless voids tucked into a loose net of brushstrokes that is equal parts gesture and restraint. Serially titled “Ghosts in the Machine,” the dark circles in these paintings are at times more like animated, dimensional forms making their way to the foreground, moving with the energy of devoted fans pushing up to the stage at a concert. Or maybe they’re salmon sniffing their way upstream, searching for both a home to start something new and a final resting place. Whatever their intent, they wordlessly present themselves advancing, receding, settling into place. Like so many of us, they are figuring out where they belong in the world.

I’ve followed Karen Schifano’s work since 2013, but we’ve only recently met outside of the internet. I admire the way her paintings remain deeply grounded in abstract principles even as they embrace growth and evolution. Searching and finding are both star performers in the theater of Schifano’s studio, and I’m very happy to be able to present some of that here. Below is the interview that resulted from a studio visit with her in the fall of 2024.
  
     - David Schell

Karen Schifano in her studio.
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

The Semi-Finalist: Hi, Karen. Thanks for taking the time to be a part of this interview series. I’ve been wanting to meet with you in your studio for about a decade and I’m glad we were finally able to make it happen. Can you talk about your formative years, how you got started as an artist, mentors you had and your big takeaways from undergrad/grad school?

Karen Schifano: So great to finally get to spend some time with you, David. I've long been an admirer of your tasty reductive work! Before getting into schooling, I must mention that my parents were both art lovers and artists, and they brought us to MoMA when we were fairly young. I learned about reductive abstraction early on, so I was always comfortable with it, not afraid of the lack of obvious subject matter. I received a BA in Art History from Swarthmore College, and then an MFA in Painting at Hunter College, where I was fortunate to be able to study  with Ralph Humphrey, Robert Morris, Bob Swain,  Sanford Wurmfeld, one class with Ron Gorchov, and Art History with Rosalind Krauss, among others. Quite a line-up!

At the time, the idea of painting functioning also as an object, in addition to being a "picture," was a major point of discussion.  The "framing edge," therefore, was seen as something to pay particular attention to, and Humphrey also spoke of the difference between "light color" and "object color," which took me a while to understand. Other formative ideas for me came from semiotics, via Rosalind Krauss, whose classes were mind-blowing!
​
As I've grown and developed as an artist, I still hold those ideas in the back of my mind. I began to make work with edges outlined that seemed to be "windows", then "doors", actual door-sized paintings that sat on the floor as theatrical objects. That idea, now that I think of it, emerged from paying attention to Robert Morris' early work with dance and sculpture, with the viewer as almost a performer in the literal space of the work. 

Ghosts in the Machine, #5
2024, flashe on canvas, 12" x 16"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: You mentioned being a creature of habit and also recognizing that instinct and improvisation play a role in your process. How did that all unfold for you in the studio in earlier work, and in the present?

KS: I like the idea of being a channel, but I also need to have something that I understand to be a "set-up" for myself, which is maybe where the idea of being a creature of habit comes in. I tend to prime a bunch of same sized canvases or pieces of paper with a background color, a field color, so to speak.  

To backtrack a little: since maybe 2012, I began to set things up with a "framing" shape, a kind of symbolic and formal device, often an opened curtain form, or mouth, an empty sign, a framed void. I wanted to bring in the outside and my own personal world, make art that was less about inventing a new formal painting language and more about expanding what abstraction could allude to. 

Happening (My Foolish Heart)
2024, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

This created the question of what would be "appearing" on that stage or space behind or below those edges.  My abstract work entered a period of being almost narrative, with symbolic shapes and the spaces that they inhabited. I began looking  at people like Sarah Charlesworth and Robert Gober. I also looked at  Louise Bourgeoise's early paintings, and  of course, Guston, when thinking about shapes, signs, symbols, their raw, "truthful" mark-making and spare compositions. I tried to find my own way, thinking about what matters to me, what felt compelling as "story-telling" in abstract terms: shape in a theater space, and in a cubist space, receding and projecting.

 After my wife's  long illness and then passing at the end of 2023, this format may have run its course. It may be that the abstracted "subject matter" of the years before was "done", no longer had the urgency it once had. I began to work using gestures on small canvases, so that I wouldn't feel the pressure of needing to make something complete, in order to allow myself to be able to mess around and toss things that didn't work. After that, it seems to be a kind of dance, putting down, taking away, in an improvisatory way. The "habit" here might be the color palette  which immediately came to mind and that I've stayed with: a slate gray field, upon which white, peach, black, would pop out, and yet also live together. Instinct, based on my years of painting, allows me to improvise within this structure. I have no idea where it will shake out!

Recent work in the studio; flashe on canvas

S-F: The word “restraint” often comes to mind when I’m looking at your paintings. I think of them as living in that wonderful space between representation and abstraction, where form and space are only ever hinted at, almost always with a sense of understatement. How do you see your work in that regard?

KS: ​I love how Miles Davis drops notes into a kind of big space in his solos. There's something lovely about the openness he leaves there, a choice of notes that leaves room for things to resonate... I want my work to be resonant in that way, without laying it all out. I want there to be mystery and a slowing down for multiple viewings, many possible  readings.

Ghosts in the Machine #2
2024, flashe on canvas, 11" x 14"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: ​Your work has evolved over the years, but the individual paintings always look like a “Karen Schifano.” What's the through-line in your work that holds it all together?

KS: Beats me! I do think I have a bold approach, can be fearless when starting out, and then try to keep that without getting too careful and fussy. Can't always pull that off. I do love shape and its ability to read as object, symbol, sign - and also the back and forth of positive and negative space around the shape. Maybe also my color palette and its graphic quality sometimes?

Ghosts in the Machine, #3
2024, flashe on canvas, 11" x 14"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: You mentioned a few 20th century artists that you have been thinking about lately and how they dealt with the concept of structure in a painting. Who have you been mulling over and what have you been gleaning from them?

KS: I've been thinking about Picasso's fearlessness, and his ability to create many different styles of work, unlike today's market-driven art world. He was experimental and restless, had the bravery that I aspire to. I still go back to Demoiselles D'Avignon and am surprised by it - the chutzpa to leave unfinished areas in, tribal masks mixed into the cubist structure of it. It's breathtaking. I made a painting called "Demoiselle",  that was my homage, and at a point in my work when I felt fearless myself. I also think that we are still plumbing cubism, that it is a treasure chest of devices and ideas that artists use in abstract as well as narrative work. Even artists who use photography and digital tools are playing with cubist structure.

Demoiselle
​2021, flashe, watercolor pencil, on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

At the moment, I'm still thinking about Peter Doig and the show he curated at Gagosian uptown, which reinforces an idea of ways to divide the canvas surface, and space beyond it. I had an epiphany about my own earlier work there, which had a kind of meta feeling derived from actual spatial formats that become "tropes". Not sure if this makes sense, but it occured to me when I saw the show. And I always try to see Alex Katz, for his boldness and panache. He's 97, I think, and is still taking chances when he paints! Others artists that I admire are all over the place stylistically, but maybe share a sense of wit and humor: Ron Gorchov, Stuart Davis, Richard Artschwager, Ed Ruscha, Blinky Palermo, Robert Gober, Myron Stout, Richard Tuttle, Moira Dryer, and of course, Guston. The list goes on and on.

The Way Home
2024, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)​

S-F: An unanswerable - or perhaps infinitely answerable - question that we chatted about in your studio: what is quality? Talk about that.

KS: The big question! I think about it as what lasts over time, beyond the flavor of the moment. It can be in work of any period and any culture. You feel it in your body, and it has duration, it hits you but also may keep changing each time you see it. I worked for decades in an art conservation studio, and I noticed that sometimes when a particular new work came in, everyone noticed it, stopped and said, “That’s good”. There was a consensus, even though most of us were artists of differing sensibilities. We felt that “quality” immediately, and it maybe had to do with the solidity and confidence of its formal construction. It “hit the spot”, and kept us looking, it had “duration”, as we used to say at Hunter, not just a momentary thrill. ​

Last Hours
2023-24, flashe on canvas, 28" x 36"
(photo by Katrina Peterson)

S-F: What’s next for you?

KS: I will attend another Returning Fellows Residency at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in the Fall. It should be a time to focus and experiment, as I have been doing for the last twenty or so years that I have participated. And I will have more time to create some new career energy, after the last five years of being a caregiver, and my recent retirement as a painting restorer. It's all open, and I feel exhilarated to now be able to paint as much as my heart desires!

A recent painting.
​(photo by Katrina Peterson)

You can see more of Karen Schifano's work...
     on her website: www.karenschifano.com/
     on her instagram: @karenschifano
     in On Balance: New Work by American Abstract Artists at Art Cake (2023)
     Karen Schifano is a member of American Abstract Artists

Works in progress.
In and around the studio.