Aaron Karp Circa 1983 Contemporary Abstraction Painting "Karp" Early Influential

Aaron Karp is a practicing artist of more than 40 years. Originally from New York, he has lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, since 1979 where he worked as an Assistant Professor of Painting and Drawing at the University of New Mexico until 1984. For the thirty years since leaving the University he has painted full time, has exhibited his work extensively, and has received recognition through a number of awards, grants, and artist-in-residencies. In 1976 Karp developed a style of painting utilizing various systems of taping to develop fractured fields of color and space. Shortly afterwards, in 1979, his work was recognized in major exhibitions at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh entitled “Systems,” as well as a second exhibition in that same year at the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem. From 1977 to 1979 Karp was Gallery Director and Lecturer of Design Fundamentals at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. In 1983 Mr. Karp was included in the Guggenheim Museum’s national exhibition “New Perspectives in American Art.” According to Guggenheim Museum Curator Diane Waldman, in a catalog essay for the show, “His paintings function on the level of pure perceptual phenomena—as statements about color, line and movement—as complex and inventive commentaries about the visual stimuli generated by the worlds of nature and art.” In 1981–82 Aaron Karp was awarded the first of two artist-in-residencies he received through the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program in Roswell, New Mexico. The second was awarded in 1985–86. In 1987 his work was once again shown in an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum entitled “Emerging Artists 1978–86: Selections from the Exxon Series.” In 1989 Karp had a major one-man show of his work at the Katharina Rich Perlow Gallery in New York, followed shortly after in 1990 by a retrospective exhibition at the State University of New York at Albany’s Fine Arts Museum. In 1992 the Amarillo Museum did an exhibition of “Stolen Objects,” his series of paintings that combined still life elements with shifting layers of paint. In his catalog essay for the show, James Moore, Director of the Albuquerque Museum, writes: “The broken color of the paint creates the illusion of movement, it vibrates in the retina, it pulls everything forward and continually reduces the space that the objects themselves define. It is as if these paintings have stolen the objects they contain and hold them hostage to their own purposes.”