Alexandra Karakashian

Born in Johannesburg in 1988 (now living and working in Cape Town), Karakshian works primarily with used engine oil, salt, oil paint, and textile. She engages the inherent aliveness of these materials to create paintings and installations that unfold between landscape and body, atmosphere and trace. Karakashian surfaces behave as living fields, absorbing, seeping, staining, and evaporating, where processes of collapse and quiet regeneration register within the same gesture.

A South African artist of Armenian heritage, Karakashian draws from the deep currents of displacement and survival that shape her family’s past. These histories surface not as depictions of exile or loss, but as a way of sensing fragility, rupture, and the instability of place. Her materials echo this condition: substances that stain, erode, preserve, and resist, mirroring the precarious states that shape both human and ecological experience. Through this, she forms a visual language that holds mourning and materiality in delicate equilibrium, offering not a statement but a space of reflection.

Karakashian approaches both painting and installation as processes of construction and dissolution, allowing the behaviour of her materials to guide the evolution of each work. Operating at scales that engage the viewer physically, her surfaces and spatial environments unfold as places one can enter, shaped through pouring, staining, erasing, suspending, and tending. Rather than resolving into fixed forms, they remain suspended in states of transformation, accumulating as atmospheres that invite slow looking and an embodied, contemplative encounter.

She received her BAFA (Honours) and MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town. She has held multiple solo exhibitions, including Beneath the broken sun at Southern Guild Los Angeles in 2024, as well as at SMAC Gallery (Johannesburg and Cape Town), Mariam Ibrahim (Seattle), Sabrina Amrani (Madrid), Villa Medici (Rome) and GNYP Gallery (Berlin). She has exhibited extensively in group shows locally and internationally, at STEVENSON (Cape Town), Museo Carlo Bilotti (Rome), Sean Kelly Gallery (New York), Iziko South African National Gallery (Cape Town), Museum of African Contemporary Art Al Maaden (Marrakech) and Galleria Anna Marra (Rome), amongst others.

Her work is held in major public and private collections including the Iziko South African National Gallery and the University of Cape Town Works of Art Collection (Cape Town); the Spier Art Collection and The Royal Portfolio Collection (South Africa); the Darvesh Collection (UAE); the Capo d’Arte and Luciano Benetton/Imago Mundi collections (Italy); Knights Bridge International (Los Angeles); and the Hans Porer and FAS collections (Cape Town and Portugal).

Notable awards and prizes include the Simon Gerson Distinction Prize at the University of Cape Town (2013); Judy Steinberg Painting Prize at Michaelis School of Fine Art (2013); MacIver Scholarship (2013 and 2014); Jules Kramer Music and Fine Arts Scholarship (2013 and 2014); and the National Research Foundation Innovation Scholarship for Masters Study (2014).