Canadian Artist | Karen Kulyk

PROFILE

After graduating in 1973 with an Honours BFA from York University, Karen Kulyk established and successfully ran Seedlings, a Toronto gallery for emerging artists while continuing her own studio work. Then in 1975, on joining the Marianne Friedland Gallery, she embarked on an eventful life of painting and exhibiting in the Mediterranean, Caribbean, Asia, Scandinavia, East and West Europe, as well as North and South America.

In 1983 Kulyk was awarded the Grollo d’Oro for her unique use of colour at the Treviso International Art Competition and a Sheila-Hugh Mackay Foundation Grant in 1997. During her long career she has been appointed Artist in Residence at universities and museums around the world, and received Fellowships at Winter’s College, York University and Grey College, Durham University, England.

Karen Kulyk is the first Canadian invited to exhibit solo at the National Gallery of Thailand, Festival Canada, Hong Kong and the Chicago International Art Fair. Over the past fifty years she has also exhibited in France, England, the United States, Bermuda and Mexico and nationally with the Art Gallery of Ontario, Dalhousie Art Gallery in Halifax, Carleton University in Ottawa, Wilfred Laurier University in Waterloo, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery and the Glenbow in Calgary.

Kulyk’s work hangs privately as far away as South Africa and Japan and is included in many museum and corporate collections around the world.

Morandi Still Life with Japanese Objects

I am a fervent admirer of the painter Giorgio Morandi. Not an extensive traveller he chose to define his world through the same windows of his country house and a collection of objects in his Bolognese studio. In his sublime still life works he renders bottles and vases down to pure form, devoid of embellishment and placed so that they overlap or just touch to produce a quiet tension within a fused image.

Inspired by Morandi’s vision I began a series of still life paintings drawing on my collection of Japanese ceramics, Kokeshi, origami, textiles and screens. They present a similar aesthetic of simple shape and decoration to Morandi’s Italian subject matter and by focusing on how they relate to one another and the space surrounding them I could achieve a sensitive harmony that superfluous embellishment would prove a distraction.

The full exhibition is available to view at Wallack Galleries in Ottawa.

Karen Kulyk

SECORD GALLERY

Contact Karen