Kara Knutson is an American painter based in the Midwest She paints the transitional place where elegies of earth, body, and sky collide. Her work is an argument with time, a refusal to accept our constrained temporality and matter, and a resistance to the sensation of being suspended in a universe without explanation. Her work pushes towards a revival of reverence and devotion within painting itself- forms that hold their history and future suspended in darkness.

Working in large-scale oil, she builds worlds where organic forms- bodies, botanicals, motion, landscape, and weather, often in combination, strain toward light and resist explanation. Kara’s work is a conversation with artists of the past- bringing chiaroscuro and ancient bodies into conversation with biomorphic modernity- where we are not any closer to an answer of the existentialism of humanity despite knowing more than ever about our existence in the universe.

Shaped by the romantic aggression of Turner and Delacroix, the chiaroscuro of Caravaggio, the spiritual atmosphere of Abbott H. Thayer, the marks of Twombly, and the gestural fearlessness of Joan Mitchell, Knutson’s work is the sensation of paint organizing itself into a conversation with its own ephemerality, into beauty it did not choose. It is the painting knowing its mortality, reflecting on it’s own past and questioning its own immortality with the viewer.

Kara maintains a rigorous, self-taught practice in the rural Midwestern United States.