More about Kara Maria
Works by Kara Maria
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At first glance, I'm enthralled by the psychedelic colors in Kara Maria's paintings.
After being dazzled by the brightness, I then spy the intense political imagery hidden in the swirls of these prismatic canvases. From surveillance cameras, to BP logos, to pornographic figures intermixed with military weapons...it's a whirlwind.
Kara's other work includes drawings on hotel stationery of vacationers (did she spy these people in real life?), images of slabs of meat, and abstracted prints.
Her most recent body of work focuses on just that, the body. Her series "Breast Portraits" omit the head of the person, but show both boobs bared. The photos she paints from were sent to Kara's e-mail by "female friends – including artists, art historians, curators, collectors, and others from across the US and abroad."
The first portrait of the series, which features her own chest, now hangs in the home of a private collector.
She is married to another local artist, Enrique Chagoya, and paints here in Sartle's hometown of San Francisco.
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Here is what Wikipedia says about Kara Maria
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Kara Maria (born 1968), née Kara Maria Sloat, is a San Francisco-based visual artist known for paintings, works on paper and printmaking. Her vivid, multi-layered paintings have been described as collages or mash-ups of contemporary art vocabularies, fusing a wide range of abstract mark-making with Pop art strategies of realism, comic-book forms, and appropriation. Her work outwardly conveys a sense of playfulness and humor that gives way to explicit or subtle examinations—sometimes described as "cheerfully apocalyptic"—of issues including ecological collapse, diminishing biodiversity, military violence and the sexual exploitation of women. In a 2021 review, Squarecylinder critic Jaimie Baron wrote, "Maria’s paintings must be read as satires [that] recognize the absurdities of our era … These pretty, playful paintings are indictments, epitaphs-to-be."
Maria has exhibited at venues including the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, de Saisset Museum, Nevada Museum of Art, and Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. Her work belongs to the public art collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, and San Jose Museum of Art, among others. She is married to artist Enrique Chagoya.
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