Refuge
Provenance : This work has been kindly donated by the artist
Exhibited :
Literature :
Notes : Alexandra Karakashian (b. 1988, South Africa) is an artist working through personal and family history. In her work, she draws on her grandfather’s escape from the Armenian Genocide in 1915 and reflects on current issues of exile, migration and refugee-status. Process and materiality is key to her practice. Refuge is part of a larger series of works where engine oil is painted onto an unprimed canvas. Active and alive on the surface the oil seeps into the canvas creating a halo of fading black oil from its darkest point. It seeps at an imperceptible pace, asking of its viewer to pause and look for longer in hope of offering a space of refuge. Karakashian’s work gains its strength, by paradoxically refusing easy, puerile communication, as her canvases propose a meditation on a ubiquitous and intense relationship on the colour black. In the formal level, among the materials, engine oil, an unorthodox substance able to translate the presence of one of the dynamos of modernity, the era of displacements and exile.
Condition_report : Structure: The work is executed on canvas and stretched with standard woods stretchers. Surface: The surface of the work is stable.
