Zina Karaman

Zina Karaman’s new body of work is a meditation on change and draws from a deeply personal journey across the last two years. Having undergone a surgery that left her without the use of her arms for several weeks, she was forced to come to terms with a new reality: in many ways the paintings the artist has created offer the experience of this shift-in both her physical and mental states - as a panorama of responses and revelations. Upon regaining full motion, Karaman recalls slashing the canvas with brushes and pigment, this violence itself representing not just a return to ‘form’ but a transition from her previously figurative work into a wild landscape of emotions. It is then perhaps no surprise to discover that Zina Karaman’s work is often made ‘outside’ of her studio in Suffolk, with only the sky as her roof, the surrounding countryside her walls and windows. This al fresco practice is something Karaman shares with the post-non-representational artist Albert Oehlen, one of the original Neue Wilde, who still, till this day, works in the open air at his studio in Spain. Bright, intense colours and dramatic application of media is also something they both hold in common, and for both Karaman and Oehlen the action of creation proposes an entanglement of sorts with nature: paint, brush, method, air and light all fusing together in some unquantifiable quantum field.