Alexandra Karakashian’s genre of meditative abstraction is realised in this series of monochromatic, multi-layered prints. A closer look at the washes of black reveals experiments in ink and paper. Imprints, tears, folding, and layering give the works depth and texture. As suggested by the titles – ‘fold’, ‘enfold’, ‘breach’ – the works push the limits of their surface, inviting the viewer inwards or creating the impression of falling outwards. Karakashian applies the considered spontaneity of her paintings to her printmaking process, with each form’s placement suggesting motion in ambiguous space. The works are compiled from strips and fragments of prints on richly-textured washi paper. In Breach, the black strips are interrupted by a sliver of white, like light ‘breaching’ a dark room. It brings to mind the words of Leonard Cohen, “there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” This poetic quality is imbued in all of the works, and throughout her practice. In the prints titled Fold I and II, and Enfold, ghostly forms enliven the washes of pigment, created with remnants from plates which are used over again so that each work shares the memory of another. The cross-pollination is furthered by the use of offcuts. The works play with printmaking as a medium in which an artwork is produced through the transfer of pigment from an object onto paper.
– Khanya Mashabela

Alexandra Karakashian (b. 1988, Johannesburg) is a South African artist based in Cape Town, South Africa.Her work stems from her personal and family history and reflects on current issues of exile, migration and refugee-statues. Process and materiality is key to her practice. Employing used engine oil and salt as a medium for painting, she engages in ecological discussion, the threatening instability and subtle collapse; and the unethical seizing of rapidly dwindling natural resources, particularly on the resource-rich African continent. Furthermore she investigates notions of mourning – both of an individual and collective nature – and the lamentation of the loss of land and of those who have been ‘unhomed’.

Her work is part of private and public collections including the Iziko South African National Gallery in South Africa, the Spier Collection in South Africa, the Darvesh Collection in the UAE, The Royal Portfolio Collection, in South Africa, and the Luciano Benetton Collection in Italy.