Laura Karetzky
Luis De Jesus Los Angeles is pleased to announce Laura Karetzky: Liar, Liar, the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view in Gallery 1 from April 19 through May 31, 2025. An opening reception, with the artist present, will be held on Saturday, April 19 from 4:00 pm to 7:00 pm.
Laura Karetzky's artistic approach involves challenging traditional narrative structures. She achieves this by merging multiple moments into a unified, believable instance, which alters the viewer's understanding of time and perspective. Her works evoke the feeling of simultaneously experiencing multiple narratives, rather than being confined to a single, linear story.
Karetzky’s double-sided works feature cut-out openings in the picture plane, inviting the outside world in and creating space for unpredictable relationships to emerge. Others are one-sided yet convey a friction of time through layered points of view. In today’s turbulent political and social climate, her practice interrogates the very nature of truth—what it means to tell it, obscure it, or exist within its many competing versions.
A hybrid of oil painting, clay sculpture, woodcut, and sgraffito, her compositions carve paint into relief surfaces, apply ceramic glazes to render illusionistic space, and push the boundaries of the rectangular canvas. “I am asking myself and my materials to perform in diverse ways, as one idea becomes several, while exploring the condition of being in perpetual juxtaposition with other spaces,” Karetzky explains. In doing so, her work does more than depict reality—it destabilizes it, forcing us to confront the shifting, intersecting layers of our own perception.
Laura Karetzky (b.1965) holds an MFA from The New York Academy of Art and a BFA from Carnegie-Mellon. Additionally, she has trained at the School of Visual Arts, The New York Studio School, Rhode Island School of Design, and studied extensively in Florence, IT. Her 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; Katonah Museum, NY; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington D.C.; Brandeis University, Waltham; MA; Bo Bartlett Center, Columbus State University, GA; and the Arnot Museum, Elmira, NY.
Recent exhibitions include, Collapsed Narratives, Dinner Gallery, New York, NY; The Outwin: American Portraiture Today, Grand Rapids Museum, Grand Rapids, MI; The Outwin: American Portraiture Today, D'Amour Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield MA; Film Noir, The Bunker Artspace, West Palm Beach, FL; Kiss Off, La MaMa Galleria Window, New York, NY; Concurrence, Luis De Jesus Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Homing, Elizabeth Houston Gallery, New York, NY; The Outwin: American Portraiture Today, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC; The Outwin: American Portraiture Today, Orlando Museum of Art, Orlando, FL; Rising Voices 3, Muskegon Museum of Art, Muskegon, MI.
She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including: 2024 NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Painting; 2024 Artist in Residence, Associazione Il Borgo degli Artisti 2.0, Bienno, Italy; 2023 Finalist, The Bennett Prize 3; 2022 Two Trees Cultural Space Award, Brooklyn, NY; 2021 New York Studio School artcritial Prize; 2020 New York Studio School Mercedes Matter Award; 2017 ESKFF Mana Contemporary Residency; 2017, 2011 Yaddo Fellowship; 2014 Milton and Sally Michel Avery endowed Fellowship at Yaddo; and 2009 New York Academy of Art Eric Fischl Award of Distinction.
In addition, she has been the subject of feature interviews in; New American Paintings/Open Studios Press, Gorky’s Granddaughter, Art Spiel, artcritical, Anti-Heroin Chic, and the Argonaut. Her work has been reviewed in; ArtNews, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Hyperallergic, American Arts Quarterly, MUSÉE Magazine, The Brooklyn Paper, and The Washington Post, among others.