Paris-based painter Ana Karkar sets an example of such externalized force, her work typically enacting a visual narrative of female body and their encompassing circumstances. It’s especially her portraitures of women that sometimes seem overwhelming to spend time with as Karkar is an artist who possesses the fundamental means to present matter in its fullest form; occurrences that are genuine and invadable, terrible and reconciliatory. All at the same time.
Having grown up in a home where gender didn’t adhere to a fixed set of definitions, Karkar has gained access to a rare sensibility that allows for her paintings to exhibit female body neutral enough and, above all, empathetic to its opposite sex. It’s her female gaze—intuitive and sort of unraveled—that authorizes everyone to observe the work without feeling the pressure of time or the often-returning discourse of objectification. It’s impossible to not succumb to the autonomous beauty that’s right there, visually as well as conceptually. Perhaps it’s almost a matter of giving in. When we’re amongst her paintings, we get to live and die through and with them. In the end, Karkar lets us experience what we were always supposed to experience when gazing upon art—we denounce, temporarily, everything else.
— Lara Konrad
for Coeval magazine
