Karen Sewell

24 May - 2 July 2022

Karen Sewell is a visual artist who works across media that include sculpture, installation, photography, painting, sound and light. Sewell lives and works in Tamaki Makaurau, Auckland, New Zealand. In 2016 she graduated with a Masters in Fine Art with Honours from Whitecliffe College of Art and Design. Her work has been selected for multiple awards, including the Glaister Ennor Graduate Art Awards, the New Zealand Portrait Awards, the Wallace Art Awards, and in 2011 she won the Premier Award at the Waitakere Trusts Art Awards. Her work is represented in national and international private collections.

Karen Sewell has been invited by the Global Art Foundation (GAA) to exhibit in Personal Structures, Venice, Italy in 2022, a Venice Biennale collateral exhibition, hosted by the European Cultural Centre. The project is then touring to three New Zealand cities following the launch at Northart Gallery in Auckland in May 2022. In Venice, Luminary I Luminare will be exhibited in historical venue Palazzo Bembo, a 15th century Venetian Palace, situated in the centre of Venice adjacent to the Rialto bridge on the Grand Canal. Luminary I Luminare explores relationships between form, colour, light, space and sound, contributing to conversations on connections between abstraction and spiritual experience. The work seeks to evoke the unfathomable mystery and beauty of cosmic phenomena, and act as a potential threshold into the terrain of the numinous.

Download the exhibition catalogue here