Jason Karolak spent a week in July 2024 working on a pair of etchings, his first project with Manneken Press. Karolak makes abstract, geometric images as a way to process information and concrete experiences in the world. He begins with gathering and collecting – pulling from his environment and the vernacular of the objects and design that he encounters. Karolak’s research extends to interests in utopian architecture and communal societies, musical structures, screen technologies, and color phenomena. This material is digested through an iterative drawing practice where forms are reworked and clarified in multiple stages, becoming usable components or anchors within the paintings. Color is organized into floating, illuminated structures, suggesting a kind of imagined or speculative architecture, set within a projected space. Stimulating, charged color is counter-balanced with a sense of quiet and air, as the paintings seek to create spaces for contemplation, restoration, and mystery.
Jason Karolak
Jason Karolak’s new editions depict floating architectonic structures in color, layered through the unique qualities of the etching and aquatint processes. “Cross-hatched” slats of chromatic hues fit together and project in space, suspending potential. Both of the prints are editions of 20, hand printed from etched copper plates on Magnani Incisioni paper.
About the Artist
Karolak was a 2024 Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Thread Residency in Senegal. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Galerie Grölle, Düsseldorf; the Boulder Museum of Art, and Morgan Lehman, New York. His work work has also been shown at Devening Gallery, Chicago; Massimo Audiello, New York; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City; McKenzie Fine Art, New York; and Robischon Gallery, Denver.
Born: 1974, Rochester, MI
Education: BFA, 1997, Pratt Institute; MFA 1997, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.