Karen Albanese Campbell
Artist Statement
Karen Albanese Campbell is an award-winning painter and printmaker creating narrative art that is personal and expressionistic. Described as “rich and diverse,” her art is marked by the symbolic relationships she creates between time-traveling human figures and abstracted landscapes. Thoroughly researching her ideas that are rooted in current events, especially the crisis of displaced people around the world, the artist layers them with her experiences, personal imagery and memory through imagination. Her imagery and style can be firmly representational, is often highly patterned and freely takes on abstract qualities. This allows her to create fluid transitional spaces to express her ideas about empathy and the search for belonging.
Albanese Campbell creates art that is based on reality but is fused with illusion, transformation and revelation. She asks, “How can my art ‘put meat on the bones’ of the fragments and scraps we carry in order to reach a truth that is more essential than facts, especially when access to facts is lost to distance, time and decay?”
Karen has exhibited her work nationally and internationally; she recently was included in the 15th Havana Bienal in Cuba. Her work can be found in the collections of the Columbus Metropolitan Library, Capitol One, and the Columbus Museum of Art. Her "Travelers" series of paintings was shown at ArtPrize in 2021. She has been awarded multiple grants, including a “Big Ideas” grant from the Greater Columbus Arts Council. Karen is the current president of Phoenix Rising Printmaking Cooperative in Columbus, OH.
While an art student at Boston University she discovered Japanese art and made weekly visits to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts renown Asian Art collection and she is heavily influenced by Asian art to this day. Born in Syracuse, NY to an Italian-American family, her own family history is crazed with differences of opinion, conflicting narratives and an appalling lack of information. Albanese Campbell, who never met her grandparents, lives in Columbus, Ohio.