Art Statement

The abstract nature of my paintings is based in my desire to simplify what is perceivable, to leave only what is essential, believing that there is an archetypal ground where we all meet in our human experience.

Underlying my work is an expression of radical freedom. Growing up on the farmlands of communist Poland infused me with a yearning for freedom — individual, political and spiritual. I immigrated as a political refugee in 1981. My new life in America was the manifestation of that yearning, and imbued me with an empathy for the human desire for freedom of thought, emotion and experience. Painting and its process are the closest I have ever experienced freedom within myself.

My paintings explore color pulsating like a breath of life, between light and darkness. I find the process of painting to be intuitive, making space in the creative process on the canvass to contemplate the inner landscape of the human condition. Like a dance of change and transformation, painting reveals fragments of nature as reflections on infinite possibilities. An evolution from the concealed, to an unraveling confession of manifest, visible reality.

My choice to use simple, natural, and raw materials— powdered pigment, walnut oil, canvas, wooden stretchers, paper, watercolor— relates to my desire to maintain a tangible connection in my process to the world from which the materials emerged.

Bio

Karpowicz grew up observing changes of light and color in the forests, meadows, sky and the sea in the land of Poland. Her father was a professor of agriculture and her mother was an art and art history teacher. Karpowicz first came to painting as a biologist, a scientist, observing nature. She was fascinated by growth and decay, life and death, wanting to understand when things began, how they changed, why they ended. She surrendered to books and microscopes until one day in the meadows she was so moved by the cool reds and the warm reds that she felt compelled to paint the color. It was the only way she felt she could understand what was in front of her. Through her art education she found an abstract expression which became the experiential science she was seeking, another way to examine the world and nature of her perceptions.

At a young age, she was compelled to leave her home country of Poland, then part of the Communist bloc, to live and paint in the United States, where freedom of expression was encouraged and respected. She graduated from Parsons School of Design in 1985 in New York City where she studied under Sean Scully. Gosha Karpowicz exhibited at Hopper House in Nyack, Equity Gallery, The Painting Center, and Anthroposophical Society in NYC amongst many. Gosha Karpowicz was a recipient of Margo - Gelb residency in Cape Cod in 2023. Her paintings can be found in private collections in the United States, Italy, Poland, Germany, and are in the permanent collection in The Museum of Contemporary Art Elekrownia in Poland.