Jason Karolak spent a week in July 2024 working on a pair of etchings—his first project with Manneken Press. Karolak creates abstract, geometric images as a means of processing information and concrete experiences in the world. His practice begins with gathering and collecting visual material from his environment, drawing on the vernacular of objects, architecture, and design he encounters.
His research extends to interests in utopian architecture and communal societies, musical structures, screen-based technologies, and color phenomena. These sources are digested through an iterative drawing process in which forms are repeatedly reworked and clarified, eventually becoming stable components or anchors within his paintings. Color is organized into floating, illuminated structures that suggest imagined or speculative architectures set within a projected space. Stimulating, charged color is counterbalanced by a sense of quiet and openness, as the work seeks to create spaces for contemplation, restoration, and mystery.
Karolak’s new editions depict floating architectonic structures in color, layered through the distinctive qualities of etching and aquatint. Cross-hatched slats of chromatic hues interlock and project into space, suspending a sense of potential. Both prints are editions of 20, hand-printed from etched copper plates on Magnani Incisioni paper.
About the Artist
In 2025, Jason Karolak received an Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant and was awarded a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Residency. He was a 2024 Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation Thread Residency in Senegal. Recent solo exhibitions include Robischon Gallery, Denver; Galerie Grölle, Düsseldorf; the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art; and Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York. His work has also been exhibited at Devening Gallery, Chicago; Massimo Audiello, New York; David Shelton Gallery, Houston; Dolphin Gallery, Kansas City; and McKenzie Fine Art, New York.
Born: 1974, Rochester, MI
Education: BFA, Pratt Institute, 1997; MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, 2006