Karen Silve

Silve has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. Earlier this year, her work was collected by the new U.S. Consulate in Monterrey, Mexico for their permanent collection. And recently she exhibited in Doha, Qatar as part of the Art in Embassies Program. Early in Silve’s painting career, she exhibited at the Jemison-Carnegie Heritage Hall in Alabama and the Tuscaloosa Performing Art Center. Since then she has exhibited at different Galleries and Universities including The Institute for American Universities in Aix-en-Provence, France, the Portland Center for the Performing Arts, and was a Resident Artist at Texas A&M University in 2011.

Ann Landi, a contributing writer for ARTnews, wrote about Silve’s work: "Like her famous progenitors—Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Joan Mitchell—Silve depends on a certain degree of spontaneity, the impact of the immediate gesture, to draw viewers into her paintings. To paraphrase the great New York School critic Harold Rosenberg, What goes into the canvas is not a picture but an event. In Silve’s case, it is the act of remembering landscapes, music, or even a particular friend. She brings her whole body to the task of painting, as Pollock did, feeling the energy running through her system and imparting a sense of corporeal presence and gesture to paint and canvas. Significantly, many of her works are human-scaled—sometimes the same height as the viewer—so that we relate to these works with our own bodies and enter into the painter’s dialogue with her materials."

Silve’s work is held by hundreds of private collections nationally and internationally as well as in numerous corporate collections. The artist currently maintains two studios, one in Portland, Oregon, and the other in Provence, France.