Gregory Lind Gallery is pleased to present Living Room Days, recent paintings by Karla Wozniak. This is the artist’s fifth exhibition with the gallery. The works in the show mark a departure from Wozniak’s earlier landscape paintings, and are her most personal to date.

In these paintings Wozniak takes her home as a subject—a small physical area laced with boundless potential for magic. They place us in domestic space, and present early parenthood as paradoxically monotonous and fascinating. Seemingly mundane subjects such as windows, rugs, plants, and children’s toys take on a wild, overwhelming energy. The living room and back yard become arenas for fantasy and hallucination. The paintings are built from idiosyncratic marks, exuberant color, and obsessively worked surfaces, creating fluctuating feelings of claustrophobia, anxiety, joy, and humor.

In Living Room 2, Wozniak presents an unstable interior where toys, musical instruments, and letters of the alphabet define the room as much as the wall and window. Dramatic light, rich color, and dense patterns knit the fractured space together. In Strange Arrangement 4, a table that holds a houseplant, slinky, and stuffed lion warps the space, merging into the rug below. The candy colors of children’s toys abut rich cast shadows.

The exhibition features large interior paintings, still lifes, and windows, allowing the viewer to physically move through the world depicted. The exhibition functions as a stage set of sorts—each painting a vignette in a larger narrative. Wozniak’s daughter is the silent protagonist here, hiding in plain sight throughout.

Karla Wozniak received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from the Yale School of Art. Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Gregory Lind Gallery, and group exhibitions at the Knoxville Museum of Art and Regina Rex in New York City. Wozniak’s distinctions include a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship; participation in the Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace program; participation in the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program; and two MacDowell Colony fellowships. Her work has been featured in a number of publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, San Francisco Chronicle, Houston Chronicle, Village Voice, and The Huffington Post, among others. Her work is included in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Knoxville Museum of Art permanent collections. Wozniak is currently an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.

• Press release (PDF) | Artist bio (PDF)
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