The window I see from my window has been there for as long as I have lived here, but recently I’ve noticed it more acutely. The distance is just far enough that my near-sighted eyes can’t make out specifics. Man or woman, about how old, I am not sure. At a kitchen table, perhaps? Reading or eating? Sometimes at 2am. I notice it. A single window illuminates a screen; a portal of life; in the dark and blank facade. Do they see me? Are they seeing me back? For the past 18 months, the rectangular box has become an obsessive reassurance of what exists outside my own self-distanced quarantine.

(Laura Karetzky)

Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is very pleased to announce Laura Karetzky: Concurrence, the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery.

For many years, Laura Karetzky has been interested in the effect that communicating, specifically through technological means, has on perception. Since the pandemic, we have relied substantially on live-media platforms to perform our daily functions, and now we appear to be stuck somewhere between the real and virtual – a hybridization of witnessing the world, both in and around us.

The phenomenon of being inside our bodies and outside, on other screens, in other windows, and in other places, has changed our understanding of space forever as the boundaries of each are merging. This has led Karetzky to question the images she sees in every aspect of her visual field. With this body of work, she addresses the story inside another story, a window in a window so to speak, superimposed or inherently found; life reinstated inside itself.

Time and simultaneity are essential to Karetzky’s work. The base layer of the panel is considered the first window. Beginning on primed wood, the artist prepares colored, textured grounds to insinuate a history of abstract marks and patterns – much like the streaked and fingerprinted surface of a smartphone or tablet. Embedded points-of-view are conveyed through her “box inside a box” composition, evocative of how we often engage with multiple “screens.”

The high-key chroma of each panel are references to color filters, and she further contrasts color and space with brushstrokes of varying degrees of looseness and precision. Together, this distinctive visual vocabulary employed across the body of work reveals an underlying theory that any of these paintings could be the window of another and could thus suggest the friction between there and here, both.

Laura Karetzky received her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, an MFA from The New York Academy of Art, and engaged in additional training at the School of Visual Arts, The New York Studio School, the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as extensive study in Florence, Italy. Karetzky’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the National Arts Club, New York, NY; Sculptors Alliance, New York, NY; New York Studio School, NY; Lehman College Art Gallery, Bronx, NY; SUNY College at Old Westbury, NY; Institute of Contemporary Art at Maine College, Portland, ME; Minneapolis College of Art and Design, MN; University of La Verne Harris Art Gallery, La Verne, CA; Kantonah Museum, NY; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; and Brandeis University, Waltham; MA.

She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including 2021 New York Studio School Artcritial Prize; 2020 New York Studio School Mercedes Matter Award; 2017 ESKFF Mana Contemporary Residency; 2014 Milton and Sally Michel Avery endowed Fellowship at Yaddo; 2011 Yaddo Fellowship; and 2009 New York Academy of Art Eric Fischl Award of Distinction. She has been the subject of feature interviews in Art Spiel, artcritical, Anti-Heroin Chic, and the Argonaut. Her work has been reviewed in the The New York Times, Hyperallergic, American Arts Quarterly, The Brooklyn Paper, and The Washington Post, among others. Laura Karetzky lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.