My Enquiry (0)
No artwork has been selected.
Please choose an artwork to enquire.
Enquiry Submitted
Thank you for your enquiry and interest in our artists’ work. A member of the gallery team will respond shortly.
000%
“Rather than understanding light as the opposite of darkness, I have become interested in the possibility that light remains present, even when it has changed form.”
– Alexandra Karakashian
In Every buried sun, Alexandra Karakashian extends her longstanding investigation into landscape, materiality, and memory, turning towards what persists through rupture and the quiet processes of transformation unfolding beneath the surface. Marking her second solo exhibition with the gallery, this new body of work introduces large-scale works on aluminium alongside new oil paintings on canvas and works on paper. Across the exhibition, Karakashian traces the shifting relationships between light and matter, burial and emergence, loss and transformation.
Central to the exhibition is Karakashian’s longstanding use of spent engine oil and her evolving understanding of petroleum as a form of “ancient sunlight.” Formed from organic matter transformed over millions of years, petroleum holds within it sunlight absorbed by living organisms in the distant past. For Karakashian, this passage from light into dark, dense matter opens onto broader ideas of burial, transformation, and persistence. “Rather than understanding light as the opposite of darkness, I have become interested in the possibility that light remains present, even when it has changed form,” she says.
Karakashian's practice examines the entanglement of personal and collective memory with ecological degradation, migration, and human intervention in the landscape. Used engine oil, salt, charcoal, paper, and textile carry their own physical, political, and historical associations, while chance and material behaviour remain integral to their transformation into images. “Material has a spirit, and with that… a history and a story,” Karakashian explains. “Rather than asking a material to illustrate an idea, I try to create the conditions in which its own behaviour can become part of the work.”
Against the backdrop of the accelerated circulation of images documenting war, genocide, ecological collapse, and human suffering, Every buried sun also considers what it means to sustain attention. Rather than reproducing the immediacy of contemporary documentary imagery, Karakashian employs abstraction to create a slower space for looking, allowing uncertainty and complexity to remain unresolved. “When everything is immediate, attention itself becomes fragile,” she observes. Her paintings ask viewers “to remain with something a little longer, without rushing towards certainty or resolution.”
Across Every buried sun, burial becomes less a condition of disappearance than one of transformation. Light is stored within matter, histories remain active beneath the surface, and forms return altered by what came before them. Through these overlapping temporalities, Karakashian considers painting as a space in which accumulation and erosion, rupture and repair, darkness and light can coexist.